Gaining an Apprenticeship is one of the best career moves that you can make. You will gain valuable skills and qualifications, and get paid while you are training. If you complete an Advanced Apprenticeship, you can even progress to higher education. And, if you can continue to work while learning you could end up with a degree with no, or little, debt.
But sometimes it can prove to be quite difficult to gain that Apprenticeship. Many training providers could offer you one, if you have the required skill and qualifications. But, an offer will normally only be made if you find an employer first. This can be the biggest problem for many who want an Apprenticeship, especially in some of the more popular skill areas, such as plumbing.
Plumbing has become one of the most popular Apprenticeships because of reports in newspapers about the big wages that plumbers can get. This may, or may not, be true, but it is one reason why thousands of young people want to become plumbers each year.
But plumbing apprenticeships are hard to find because:
You will really need to think about the job or skill that you want. For example, lots of young people want to be motor mechanics. This could be because they like cars and look forward to having their own. But their might be lots of other young people thinking the same thing, so it is why a motor vehicle apprenticeship may be difficult to find. And yet there might be vacancies in mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering involves the design, development, installation, operation and maintenance of just about anything with moveable parts. So, although you would not be working with cars, you would get training in a much wider range of subjects and may be paid more.
There are often vacancies in business administration, sometimes because young people are unaware of what can be involved in the job and so think it will be a boring subject. But an Apprenticeship in business administration could lead to a career in finance, insurance or law, or could lead to a management position in an office environment.
In this guide you will find tips to help you decide on which job you may want in the future and how to find a trainer and an employer to offer you an Apprenticeship.
What do I really want to do?
If you are thinking about doing an Apprenticeship, you do need to know what
you want to do. If you get an interview the employer will definitely ask
why you want the job, so you do need to know as much as possible about
the job and why you want it.
