Why Apprentices Are Important To Us & Apprenticeship Mythbusters

Why Apprentices are important to us Blog Header

As it is national apprenticeship week as well as International Women's Day we thought there would be no better time to share with you our wonderful apprentices Meg & Kathryn. Both Meg & Kathryn have made huge impacts on our business whilst gaining valuable, hands-on work experience they have shared new ideas for moving the business forward.

Meg & Kathryn - Ladderstore Apprentices

Meg has been with Ladderstore for over 18 months and if you’ve purchased anything from us and have spoken Meg in our customer service team you will have noticed she’s as eager and knowledgeable as the rest of the team. Meg has also recently completed her NVQ Level 2 in customer services with a lot of hard work and is now preparing herself to continue learning on the next level. Well done Meg, we are all very proud of you!

Some would say she’s moving up the ladder of success. (Some would also say that was a terrible pun and very unnecessary, they may be right)

Kathryn is fairly new to the business and is working as a Digital Marketing Apprentice through NowSkills, a specialised company offering apprenticeships in IT and Digital Marketing. Although Kathryn has only been with the company for 5 months she’s got her feet under the table very quickly. She’s taken control of our social media and has used her creative side to create interesting and engaging content. She’s also visited e-commerce shows and has been involved in digital strategy away days alongside her apprentice training. The exposure she’s had is much more of what would be possible by going to college alone. (We were going to add another ladder pun here but unfortunately, we’ve only got the one)  

Apprenticeship Mythbusters

Apprenticeships have moved on and are being talked about a lot more as career options than 5-10 years ago. They are being recognised as a great programme to help build and develop young people by exposing them to business-related tasks, grow their confidence and earn a qualification in the process. There is still a lot of questions about apprenticeships and we thought we’d myth busted some of these questions for you.    

Apprenticeships are only available in trades - Years ago apprenticeships were most popular in trades and for manual jobs however times have changed. You can now get apprentices in trades and many other fields such as Digital Marketing, Accounting and Customer Service.  

Apprenticeships don’t earn very much - To begin with apprentices have to be paid £3.40 per hour however many employers like ourselves pay more than this. There are also higher-level apprenticeships available with larger salaries, for those who don’t want to go to university. Even if you earn an apprentice wage whilst you learn, the experience further down the line will become invaluable and open up many career opportunities.   

Apprentices aren’t valued - We could go on for a while with this myth. Our apprentices at Ladderstore are valued and appreciated, they are given opportunities for further development and are treated to be on the same level as everyone else. With that said when searching for apprenticeships be sure to check out the companies offering them, not everyone will be as good as us. (We do like to blow our own trumpet occasionally, but this is solely based on feedback we’ve had)    

Summary

In conclusion, you can probably tell Ladderstore are an extremely proud apprentice employer. We’ve hired many apprentices over our time, many have enjoyed themselves and moved on, others are still here and maybe here for the long haul. All we care about is our apprentices learn, develop and make a difference.