Businesses need to get more used to saying “You’re hired!”
Alan Sugar has become famous for the words ‘You’re fired’. However, these are exciting times when more of us should be searching for Apprentice’s and saying with confidence: ‘You’re hired’.
We’re excited that Ware Anthony Rust, for the first time in 26 years, is about to take on an Apprentice from Cambridge Regional College. But we should not be as this has been the more normal career path for the majority of our management board and was the ethos of the founders of our agency.
When many of us left school the range of courses on offer was very different from today. Apprenticeships for all manner of work were still in vogue and it was acceptable for 16 and 18 year olds to enter the work place. Not for a dead end job, but to build a career with a blend of work experience and training – both at work and through other learning options.
Many of our European neighbours still have ‘parity of esteem’ valuing the skills of the craftsman as highly as the graduate. Britain lost that somewhere over recent decades.
At present, the flurry of activity of ever more students chasing ever fewer university places is hitting the headlines ahead of the planned hike in tuition fees next year.
That there are now new approaches to apprenticeships explains why we are excited at the prospect of nurturing some raw talent whilst allowing the Apprentice to complete some extra qualifications at college.
So apart from our shift from the search for a junior exec with some work experience and almost without exception a degree, to a recognised Apprenticeship scheme in line with no doubt a wider trend amongst employers to more readily consider this option, a recent article in The Independent also sparked a long held view in our agency on the subject of degrees. You don’t need one to get on and you certainly don’t need one to excel. The article led with examples of millionaire entrepreneurs such as Deborah Meadon of Dragon’s Den fame and Sir Anthony Bamford, Chairman of JCB. Of course there’s doing well and there’s prospering to multi-millionaire level but they are great examples.
Most of our management team are students of the university of life. In common with many in the creative industries we cut our teeth on the ‘shop floor’, whether in a creative agency or on the news desks of some of this region’s leading papers.
What we’ve found worked for us all – graduate or not – was an instinctive hunger for learning whether that is just for learning’s sake or to improve what we do and how we do it. We also had, and still have, a passion for the work we do, which could have been nurtured as our post school learning within the work environment was so focused. That perhaps is another debate but what we have in common is a work-based learning experience from the start which developed, not stifled, our careers.
We’ve always sought to create an environment where the smart, talented and hardworking can progress through peer-to-peer learning as well as external courses. And this has been a successful model. But don’t get us wrong, we’re not against a university education. However, all too often we’ve encountered candidates who may be academically qualified but have neither the hunger, the intelligence nor the wit to succeed, certainly in our business. In a civilised, established and sophisticated society such as ours the role of academia and the need for those inspired to study within that world is still critically important. How else will we nurture the thinkers, writers, mathematicians of the future?
But in our experience the degree is not an instant passport to a successful career, particularly where students choose a degree which is has been designed around our industry.
So perhaps like the newly named ‘Skillionaires Club’, the name given to the millionaires featured in The Independent, we can testify to success without a degree just as many of you reading this no doubt will testify to success with one. And in the world in which we now live we’re pleased that a more balanced view on the role of post school education, equipping people better for work, has emerged. We really do look forward to uttering those words used so rarely by Lord Sugar: “You’re hired!”