WCG, formerly known as Warwickshire College Group, is one of the leading and largest FE colleges
in the uk. We operate across seven colleges across Warwickshire and Worcestershire. We offer
a wide variety of programs, we have 15,000 students and approximately 1,500 members of staff.
We deliver a thousand programmes across 20 different subject areas and that includes FE, HE, and adult part-time courses.
We also work with the UK's top employers to deliver up to two and a half thousand apprenticeships a year.
The areas that we deal with apprenticeships in covers business support, hair and beauty, care and hospitality
but also construction, motor vehicle, engineering land-based service engineering as well.
lf you look at our engineering facilities at Trident and Rugby, they have state-of-the-art
equipment which is more often than not sponsored by some of the employers that we work with, so
our apprentices get to use up-to-date equipment which they can then develop those skills and
take that into industry as well. And then you could go to Moreton Morell or Pershore, which would be a
completely different landscape where you could be looking at horses so you've got your equine
facilities there but equally you've got your state of the art Agri-tech centre as well in Pershore.
Lifelong learning is really really important whether that's apprenticeships, whether that's
a course at college or going on to university and I think that lifelong learning piece is so so
important to develop yourself and develop your career. The team offers a screening process for
for employers so once we put the vacancy up we do a pre-interview with all the
would-be apprentices that apply. So the team that I'm working in does quite a lot of office-based
apprenticeships, so we do business administration, customer service, we do general marketing and
digital marketing, we do IT and software and teaching assistant, so it's a really big range.
The real benefit is that people get really good solid work experience so you get to find out
what it's really like to work in that field that you're interested in. In a small company you're
going to become a really important part of the team really quickly and probably get a chance
to do lots of different things. If you work in a larger company it might be much more structured
but you'll probably get a chance to move around different departments or get a sense of what it's
like to be part of a big corporate organisation. I think if you compare it with some of the
alternatives, so if you think about somebody who goes to an apprenticeship straight from school at
16, by the time some of their peers have graduated at 21 they've got five years work experience
which makes you really employable. Most of the apprenticeship opportunities are advertised on
the national apprenticeship service website so if you put 'find an apprenticeship' into google you'll
find that. The first thing we would look at when we look at an application form is to make sure
they're talking about the right job role they're applying for so if they're applying for marketing
talk about why they'd like to get into marketing and if they've got any experience of that, making
sure they're using capital letters, full stops, if you've got predicted grades and they are
then proper grades further down the line, making sure they're changed, so if you're using a similar
application form for different roles making sure you then tailor it, including things
that you might have done as hobbies, if you've done a sport that's got teamwork as part of it,
helping out any family do stuff, so all that stuff can count towards your skills. Within your program
you will have a work based learning manager, they will support the overall apprenticeship along with
supporting your employer. They'll be a regular point of contact, they will do pastoral
care to a certain degree, you'll also have a separate assessor who will come
and visit in the workplace and help you build your portfolio of evidence. If people need extra support
with anything, if they need somebody to sit with them and work with them on their assignments,
and we've got our own support team to do that. I chose an apprenticeship because I like classroom
learning but I also like to be quite hands-on, so it's better for me to get the qualifications and
the hands-on knowledge at the same time, so I think the apprenticeship worked well for me as
I get both elements. So I did my apprenticeship in engineering and came out of that, my apprenticeship
engineering was split up into the mechanical side of things and the more logic programmable
kind of side of things. I really enjoyed the programming kind of things and I didn't enjoy the
mechanical so much, so obviously what I'd learned from there, I decided to take it into software
development where I was using a lot of code. I've just recently completed the account management
app for the college. I was in charge of making that happen. Anybody coming here to do an apprenticeship
I'd really recommend it. There's lots of great skills you can learn here, lots of great courses,
anybody will cater for anybody's needs, anybody who wants to do different things, there's something
for everybody, especially an apprenticeship. You get all your skills, all your knowledge and you
can massively propel yourself forward in your career. We cover a wide range of subjects at Warwickshire
College, I think we have something like 2,500 apprentices across all seven colleges. Across the
seven colleges it delivers land-based, horticulture, construction, engineering, business,
hospitality, it's such a wide area. I think there's around about 15 skills areas so those skills areas -
in construction, you can have in excess of about six different apprenticeships you can do, same
with hospitality, it's one skills area but you can do food production, hospitality team member, between
12 to 15 skills areas that we offer. I think it's fantastic that somebody can have an opportunity to
firstly get a nationally-recognised qualification, which an apprenticeship is, and they're also
obviously earning money working in the workplace. But they're also getting that day-to-day
experience of working in the workplace and there's some things you can teach in college and
some things you can't. Similar to working in the workplace, there's things that you need to be in a
classroom environment for, so really it's a win-win because that apprentice is somebody that's going
to be learning and getting that work experience at the same time, with a job at the end of it.