so you fancy putting your new managers on an apprenticeship?
Level 3 Apprenticeship for Supervisors / Team Leaders in a Nutshell
Are you thinking of putting some of your aspiring managers through a modern, trailblazer apprenticeship? If so, here a few important things you need to know…
Firstly the great news is that anyone over 16 with 5 GCSEs or more can do this qualification and the government will fund 90% of it! Either through the levy or directly if you are a smaller company. It takes 12-18 months to complete and the price is capped at £5K making it a challenge for learning providers to make any profit.
The good news is that it is a very comprehensive qualification which will enable a broad and deep knowledge and lots of practical experience in team leadership, management, organisational leadership, performance management, change, customer service, project management, finance and operational management. Your junior managers will put your senior ones to shame with their level of knowledge. It also helps candidates with their self-awareness, decision-making and with managing their time and planning which is crucially important, as there is a great deal of work!
The apprenticeship is very prescriptive so if you’re not careful there could be some rather boring training sessions involved. It has 17 units, but with a bit of work and imagination they can be split into themes so that the boring bits can be mixed with exciting bits and the 24 work based
assignments can be spread reasonably easily over the 15 months. In our case, we’ve even managed to include experiential learning activities in every single day workshop day!
The not so good news for people with a busy day job, is that there is a great deal of work involved.Candidates will need to…
attend a series of workshops (typically this might amount to 15 days which I would recommend taking over 15 months)
have a regular (monthly) performance review with their line manager
develop a portfolio of evidence which shows that they have completed all the ‘skills’ parts of the programme and have it assessed (for example coaching somebody over 6 sessions) – there are 24 of these!!
take a two multiple choice knowledge tests
undertake a competency based interview
undertake a professional discussion based on their CPD log
have regular professional discussions with their assessor
So basically expect each learner to need to spend 370 hours on this qualification which is around 46.25 8 hour days or just over 9 weeks over 15 months! Do make sure that they have enough a reduction in workload to be able to cope!
So in a nutshell, it’s a bargain because of government help and because of the pricing cap, it’s very comprehensive, if you choose the right provider the learning will be engaging, and it’s a lot of work.
