How Can Apprenticeships Grow Your Start-Up

These days we are living in a very paradoxical time when starting your own company is probably easier than it was ever before in history. The business procedures, digital tools, and newbie-friendly legislation truly make this era “the golden age of startups.” And yet, the startup survival rate is reaching some abysmal levels, with less than 40% of startups making money, and 90% of them eventually needing to close their doors forever.

So, even despite excellent infrastructure and a favorable business climate, hard work and fresh ideas do not automatically guarantee success. What can we do to make the survival of our gigs more probable?

Well, the remedies are as plentiful as they are versatile. Let us look at a couple of compelling reasons why using an apprenticeship should make you one of the top guns in your startup arsenal.

Ensuring the team’s immediate capacity

The last couple of years were very rough for the USA and the global labor market, pushing it into a real crisis and leaving approximately 7.6 million positions vacant. The traditional recruitment channels proved to be very ill-equipped to deal with such challenges. Apprenticeships, on the other hand, present a much more versatile model that allows you to overcome some of the more rigid recruitment norms, get access to fresh pools of motivated workers and always keep the immediate capacity of your teams at an optimal level. That gives business leaders far more leeway with long-term, strategic planning.

A greater level of diversity across teams

Recently, diversity and inclusion have been very frequently cited as some of the most important labor requirements. And rest assured, this trend is not coming from some ill-advised effort to check some imaginary diversity boxes. People of different age groups, backgrounds, education levels, and previous work experiences present a goldmine of fresh ideas and approaches your company can use to shake things up and keep its operations in high gear. Considering that workers at similar jobs often come from similar backgrounds, leveraging apprenticeships is a good way to expand this pool.

Access to a highly motivated workforce

People who are looking for an apprenticeship are always hard workers willing to learn, push their careers to a new level and reach proficiency outside their comfort zone, even if they need to fight an uphill battle to get there. Offering them a platform for meeting these goals will give you access to some of the most well-motivated workers you can find on the market. For instance, the woodworking sector is becoming increasingly popular and profitable. Therefore, a cabinetmaking apprenticeship presents a great way to get the handle on this booming industry to the benefit of all parties involved.

A road to higher retention rates

High employee turnover is one of the greatest weaknesses of the present-day business world. How does apprenticeship as an employment model address this issue? Well, turning your company from a simple one-time employer where people stay only until the next gig to a career development tool that guides new hires from the first industry steps to senior industry positions gives workers a gigantic incentive to stick around and use all these resources to their advantage. In a recent survey, 69% of employers stated apprenticeship improved their retention levels so this claim is more than backed up.

Lower recruitment costs

The traditional recruitment processes are very taxing, cumbersome, and in light of the previously mentioned labor shortage, very hard to pull off. As a result, hunting down talented, experienced, and sought-out industry talent ends up being a very expensive affair. Using the apprenticeship work model makes this situation drastically simpler. Instead of focusing on a broad set of parameters, your HR teams can put into highlight some very simple and easy-to-identify soft skills and forge the candidates into high-value employees down the road. That makes this form of hiring far simpler and more efficient.

Opportunities for standardization

Last but not least, we want to point out one elephant in the room. Using apprenticeship as an employment model does make recruitment simpler and cheaper but it puts the pressure of empowering a new workforce entirely on the shoulders of your company. But since you are running a startup, this idea is far simpler to implement than in developed corporate environments. Furthermore, new candidates present new opportunities for learning, recording data, and standardizing your onboarding and training procedures. This level of uniformity can only benefit your startup as it builds its industry tenure.

We hope these couple of suggestions gave you a general idea about how using the apprenticeship model can benefit the development of your startup and help your company overcome the odds and soar to success. Of course, this single resource won’t be able to keep your company afloat on its own. But it does present a great way to make your employee pool fresh and overcome one of the greatest weaknesses of the present-day business arena. This simple advantage shouldn’t be easily overlooked. Working at the optimal capacity and keeping your teams intact presents one of the basic business foundations – apprenticeship effectively moves both these issues off the table.