Education Vs Experience, Why Not Both? For A Speech On Degree Apprenticeships

talk thank you thank you for everyone for coming uh so I want to talk about education versus experience um a key kind of argument in the industry and kind of putting uh forward a perspective of why we can't have both so um I'm I don't want to give too much hate to degrees um I am a bit biased because I did a degree apprentiship a few years back um but I'm going to kind of think I'm kind of I'm going to kind of explain why I think it's more Superior option um so yeah so who am I so picture um so as it happens in a couple weeks I'm acting as Jesus in a play um I'm only Ching um

but uh I was so I'm currently there we go I'm currently a scrw Analyst at feat space a couple of the guys here have already given talks from the same company uh it's based out at the Science Park here in Cambridge we do fraud detection uh for banks I was an IT Apprentice for 5 years at an industrial printing company and I completed a degree apprenti ship through uh one of the local union here at angular Rasin uh it lasted four years um I was guinea pig in many ways so since then a lot of changes have been made for the apprenticeships which I think are good um have improved them greatly I'm going to kind of direct

this more employers but I am going to talk to the apprentices or potential apprentices a bit later in the presentation too so how do they work so firstly when I was at school kind of you were encouraged to do the typical life path you know you go to school to 16 get good gcse's then you attend college for for a couple years you study three or five three to four possibly five if you're a nerd uh subjects you get good a levels and then you go to a good uni and you study one subject and then after that you get a career in that subject doesn't always work that way there are a lot of

disadvantages to it um and when I was at school apprenti ships was seen more was tooo they were more for like the naughty kids or the special kids kids who weren't academically inclined weren't good to school um and traditionally as well was seen as a role for college levers so people who are leaving College like 18 um but I've seen people from 16 to late 50s uh so kind of a variety of Ages who have engaged as apprentices uh so this is as I say a presentation to um showcase why I think it's a superior option so they usually require three a levels to enter however I didn't have the equivalent a levels I entered when I

was 17 so I didn't do the traditional one I only studied it in college for a year um so I had like I think the equivalent of one of two but I got an interview with the uni through my organization um and I'm man to win them over um and that's how I got got into the guinea pig program it's a long-term investment so it's going to be 3 to six years usually uh depending on the track you do and the industry obviously I'm talking primarily from it and cyber now um it's also going to involve as you progress through the degree you're going to spend evenings and weekends you know uh studying and investing time uh and

you can do bachelors and you can do Masters one of the guys I did a degree appren with bachelors in his late 50s he uh completed a masters shortly after um very interesting guy wanted to keep challenging himself so apprentices pay zero University fees I think the average at the moment is 45,000 um for a degree so a lot of money and theyve just extended the um the period on which you have to pay I think it's 30 years now um but this doesn't mean that employeers just have to Fork out all the costs so there are two options the first is Levy paying so the organization pays a levy to the government um you know small small

amount I don't know I can't quote you because my organization never told me that um but you get other benefits from paying those levies but also if you do that the government will pay for the whole degree and all the fees and then the second option is um because the the government wants to get people more into friendships and More in Industry they will pay for 2third of it C I think it's 18,000 um and then the organization has to pay for the last third and then for sign up I just put a link here um to apply um to being an apprentice appren so I'm going to go through some pros um for the employers and in the

employees kind of why motivations so first one for the employer you can help fill the skills Gap we you know there is a skills Gap there um I was talking to James B who gave a talk earlier and he had a different um uh kind of mindset on the skill Gap and he he said that it was because of where people were placed he he said there was uh I think 70% he quoted um people placed security vendors rather than the small businesses that need them in house so yeah you could argue that I think there still is a skills Gap we've got a lot of numbers to prove that um and then for the employee

it's great for those that are not academically inclined as I said so it's not just going to be study and a lot of modu is going to be relevant to what you're doing in the workplace so the next one uh cheap labor we're not running the sweat shop of course but uh you know you're going to get people at are discounted rate but they you know youth or and as I'll go into more um advantages in a minute uh and also the employee um they'll be a well-rounded professional at the end so they're not just an academic that's coming from uni they know how to conduct themselves in meetings they know how to write emails

they know these kind of basic things that um you want when you go for for your roles so and this is another thing um about getting them in young you can inject current learning techniques um a new knowledge into the workspace so as a degree Apprentice you are forced to learn you have to learn you know you have to learn the latest learning techniques um and how to study things like mind maps reports um you know things that your current um employees might not use uh and then of course a big one for employees possible apprentices there's no student that uh for the employer you can enhance your reputation uh it's you know it's great

for the Press say y we're we're helping Bridge the skills Gap you know we're we're giving jobs to these young people we're struggling to get into the industry and then for the employee The Apprentice there's no lost time so you've got four five maybe six years of experience at the end of it but you've got degrees well degree maybe degrees if you go for the Masters like like my pre my peer did and then for the employe um you're motivating employees because you're learn you're teaching them skills with a lot of employees now particularly in cbar I think Keith was talking about earlier in his talk with the mid-level they're struggling to now move to the the ciso and the next level

because people aren't teaching them the new skills they're not getting investment we degree PL ships you're getting that whether it's bachelors's kind of getting in or Masters for excelling a bit and then for the employee The Apprentice you're spending time learning on more relevant knowledge you're not you know just engaging in theoretical um modules so I'm going to give you some stats so this first one here so you know if you remember a minute ago when I said about the two different payments so round out up to 70 7 out of 10 employers pay the government Levy so the government pays for all of their degree for their apprentices so probably the way to go I'd say and then this one

surprised me um so for the age of apprentices about half of them 25 plus so again going back to that kind of traditional life path of going to University going to college then going to college sorry and then going to University get the job doesn't seem like it's really applicable in the real world um you know the idea that you should have your career and everything set up for your late 20s early 30s it's not proving to be popular with apprentices uh and then I don't know how well you can see this actually essentially the yellow graphs are typical parentheses so that's level two level three you know degrees of level five to six I think or 6 to 7 5 to 7 um

they're going down and then I don't know if you can tell but the green bar degree apprenticeships now they were first introduced around 2014 the Academic Year going into 2015 you say they're slowly going up uh and then again following the colors from the pie chart the highest people attending degree appren ships and overall appren ships are 25 plus let you take that picture right so I think a lot of employees feel like this guy with the skills Gap uh well the industry should we say so the demand keeps increasing I think we all know that the Cyber criminals they're not slowing down if anything they're speeding up um employees sometimes they have unrealistic expectations um with their

budget as well so what I see commonly is people want someone who's senior but they forget that those people are expensive and they bring with them bad habits um with with apprentices you can bring them in and you can mold them into what you can can be um you know especially if they're youthful and they come in and you know come in straight from school you know it's bit controversial but you know why do you think Hitler create Hitler Youth it's because he could indoctrinate the youth early on and then mold them as they grew up and turned into adults if you do that with apprentices teenagers and they go into the early 20s they're coming in

with those uh early learning skills and those patterns of doing things and they're going to be um quite skillful and then employees aren't keeping skills updated so people can um become slow they can be stagnant they might be happy where they are staying where they are but if the company wants to progress apprentices have to learn they they they that's part of getting through the degree they aren't given a choice so it's just going to be a standard part of their everyday life so here are here's a list of famous employeers uh voted by apprentices uh it's the top 100 you probably recognize a few of them from their their logos um I've included a few tech companies of

course like BT group who my team lead she was an apprentice there um Fujitsu bodone O2 there's a few others and then energy and and takeaways right so now I want to talk to the apprentices so I want to look at the cons so first thing is juggling work and studies can prove challenging um particularly if you know you're an apprentice like some of them were who had kids uh when you need to start you know spending evenings and weekends it can prove hard and strenuous on the family family life but I think the idea you got to keep in your head is you're doing this so you can progress in your career and provide them better life so

in the short term it kind of sucks but in the long term I think it pays off um I also think this can be a good thing because it teaches people about time management and energy management and um there's an ongoing problem in cyber at the moment with burnout um and I I think that's because people haven't they've been demand there's been a lot of Demand on them and they haven't managed their time and expectations um and saying no to things uh to well so you can't party like most of your uni friends I've tried that the thing is when you come in the next day and you hung over and you've went to the

club you know maybe you met someone or whatever but you're not going to be able to perform to the same level as someone who's had you know clean clean 8 hours of sleep they've had their breakfast um and maybe they've put in some study in the night for you're just not going to be able to perform to that level and yeah it's not practical especially if you work full-time you're not going to get away with this long term and it's going to show uh and again another thing that could be seen as something good early on but you get responsibility thrust on you I think it's it's good to be young at times and and to slowly have that on and

not force too much pressure because that can I think break people um especially if they're not strong and it's been it's not been gradual push but uh a more of a force uh um and then tving issues for new programs so for mine for instance um I did mine I started in 2017 finished in 2021 and I won't go into the the you know the details I don't want to throw shade on on the the the learning provider but there were um issues with communication um and documentation and I think that improved over time because I was called called back last year I was I was thinking something happened there's been some sort of event like an

investigation but they called us back a few of us to jump on a call with um people who were apprenticed and people who currently are to throw in um problems and discuss them and give feedback so I think things are improving so now I want to talk about Pros give some positives and by the way going back to that slide I think all these things can turn be turned around to good things but they just need to be placed in the right way you know things like um the too much responsibility early on not pounding on straightway but gradually um as they go along so so first one so assignments at unique can be theoretical whereas when you do a

degree apprenticeship they have to be work relevant generally um you have to know that they work in the real world because a lot of the um stuff you're going to talk about NDA providing um is going to be from your workplace uh so an example for me uh would be I did a cloud module and we did it in zo and it was good um I learned a lot about cloud and I learned about Zer but in my company we using AWS and in various companies I use now most people are using AWS so it would have probably been better to use that tool and you learn about how business works as well again going back to

conducting yourself in meetings emails things like that um and business comes down to people and I've heard so many stories about people um who are uni full-time students and they'll be in a um in a group project and one person does all the project work one person never turns up to the classes with us we did group projects we didn't have that choice and because we were so used to working for full time we didn't want another person to do all the work we wanted to be there to learn and then no do no debt as we we as we've talked about I regularly uh brag with some of the other guys On My Level

now who went to UNI it's like yeah and lucky uh and then opportunities so you'll soon get over fears of public speaking presenting things like that because you're forced to as an apprentice um particularly with your internal teams it's how you kind of get ideas along um and then another would be it's easier to get involved in conferences because people are going to approach you people aren't going to generally approach students um say you want to come to this conference you want to present here because you're a student why do we want to do that right really I think we should because then it's kind of bringing them in and they can learn things but it's just not the way things

are at the moment and then you might be lucky enough to travel uh which I was um I went for a data migration in India and that was a learning experience um in terms of culture and um projects not going to plan again real world and then it propels you forward so mine was an IT apprenticeship but I was able to in the last year specialize in cyber and then immediately after I pretty much after I finished the degree that same year I transitioned into a secur team this this depending on how you positioned yourself um if like you know my team lead for instance she did a cyber security dedicated degree she was able to go around different teams and so

she had more background knowledge and security um so she was able to I I would argue um Propel forward further than someone who like me who just did the it um was a bit limited on the Cyber stuff but I'm catching up so how does an employee need to proceed so uh here is a link for an employeer having to sign up so for the learning provider it can be a university it doesn't have to be some third party company uh and then this can be done on the go site for advertising here um or you can display it like any other role with LinkedIn or use your recruitment team or indeed whatever um you're probably going to get

a lot of applicants I imagine at the moment the way the space is going so you might want to put a time limit on that and then there's just two agreements You' got to sign and that's just to make sure that the employer the employee The Apprentice and the learning provider uphold um the uh the the standards set in the terms there any questions he's not going to challenge

me okay one one issue I found in my you're on your way there though yes uh is that the list of skills uh you obtain from an apprenticeship might be quite now yeah yeah how how how would you say that so just in terms of like you may be restricted to what your team is working on okay having that that yeah that would be limited to the employer and yeah I like to think that most employeers who are engaging in the apprentiship scheme um are doing it because they're ready to provide opportunities things like travel working with different teams um would you say that would have been I mean without you getting in trouble would you say

sometimes maybe you've been narrowed in things you're doing yeah yeah fair enough do you think going into uni going doing the different modules that you get um exposure to various things that you might be interested in but you can't do it your current employer uh I I don't sorry college right uh okay not yet right Fair we can talk after if you want yeah Liam my man for so first of allce with Val system your okay yeah I did have a point in this I must have missed it so um my company what they did was if you leave after the if you leave any time before the first trimester so the first three months September to December

traditionally that that's fine you can get away SC free if you leave anytime after that you have to pay for it so the second well it would be the government's job to do that at that point traditionally yeah I don't know enough about that to the second is skill Gap so skill Gap my

mys anal team lead and New Management you think there's a ceiling no a Gap a so what we find is with you need to be a to M that to be that standard to give them the benefit and the organization right what happens when you have so you mean the the mid mid- level one yes so what I would maybe encourage then and this might be hard depending on their age as well look like my peer who was in his late 50s he owned the business he did The Bachelor but then he went and did the Masters so even if they've come in um and they're mid- level they've got a degree I would encourage become a degree apprenticeship

do a masters possibly no no no I want this yeah we need this the yeah you have employ that have got the and skill oh I see what you mean so you're limited on the people who can train experience for example peopleas report do 20% work time effort yeah if they haven't got the right people in that you put that's from an point of view if the organization set up for it