The 100 Day Challenge
YHATA is very proud to be part of the Hull Daily Mail and East Riding Mail’s campaign to change 100 young people’s lives by signing up as a partner in the 100-day Apprenticeship Challenge. Part of a national initiative, directed by the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS), YHATA is joined in the quest by training providers Hull College and East Riding College.
The idea is simple: to get 100 new apprenticeships placed in the Hull and East Riding region in just 100 days.
Of course, there’s a huge amount of work that needs to go in to delivering this simple idea, but we at YHATA are ideally placed to meet the challenge and really make the difference – not only to young people, but also to employers.
Employers – we need you!
Right now our Employer Engagement Officers are busy talking to employers who’ve perhaps never before considered the benefits they could gain from taking on an apprentice. Maybe they hadn’t realised that YHATA can provide full support should they want to start an apprenticeship scheme, that it’s nowhere near as complicated as they might think, and that the outlay is pretty modest – just the apprentice’s weekly wages (our standard weekly admin fee of £25 has been waived for the first 10 employers joining us during this campaign).
For this, the employer gets a young person, pre-screened by us, ready and willing to learn on the job. By the end of a 12-month period, the apprentice will have gained a vocational qualification (with training funded by the government in many cases), along with vital work experience. For employers looking to the future, for the next generation of skilled worker, apprenticeships offer the ideal route. What’s more, over 80 per cent of employers who already have an apprentice say that they make their workforce more productive.
And apprenticeships work in a whole variety of sectors and industries, too. We’ve got apprentices placed in a host of companies, learning skills from warehousing to catering, as well as the more traditional placements in the construction and engineering industries, of course.
Looking to the future
So we’re on the lookout for forward-thinking companies who want to invest in the future of their workforce and to retain existing skills alongside the introduction of new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. We’ve got some brilliant and motivated young people on our books just waiting for the right opportunity to show what they’re made of.
We’re confident that the campaign will create 100 apprenticeships and change the lives of 100 young people. But even when the 100 days is up, we won’t stop there. We’ll keep going, continuing to tell employers just how they can benefit from taking on an apprentice, and changing the lives of as many young people as we possibly can.