The top retail and investment banks are turning to apprenticeships to train recruits in specialist and leadership roles, alongside their graduate programmes.
Barclays, Lloyds, JP Morgan and Santander offer higher and, increasingly, degree apprenticeships in roles spanning relationship management, finance, technology and leadership.
JP Morgan began its programme five years ago with higher apprenticeships in financial services and technology based in Bournemouth, finance roles in Glasgow and graduate-level technology roles in Edinburgh under Scotland’s separate system. Last year it extended its apprenticeships to its London offices at Canary Wharf. It has 70 apprenticeship roles and says the number of applicants has increased 20-fold since 2013.
For its 18-month level 4 apprenticeships in financial services and digital technology solutions, candidates need three C grades at A level or the equivalent, with no bias towards any subject. Its four-year level 6 apprenticeships require grades equivalent to ABB or higher and applicants must have at least one qualification in maths, computing or technology. Higher apprentices have a starting salary of £15,000 a year in Bournemouth, or £21,000 a year in London, plus perks such as private healthcare and an occupational pension.
Level 4 apprentices study for an investment operations certificate, equivalent to a foundation degree, with the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment. Level 6 apprentices are awarded a BSc (Hons) in digital and technology solutions.
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Phillip Page, the head of early careers at JP Morgan, says the academic threshold ensures that recruits will cope with the study involved, run by BPP, a private university. The recruitment process, he says, focuses more on candidates’ skills and aptitudes. From the outset, the bank wanted there to be no barriers or “glass ceilings” that would block the career development of people who joined as apprentices rather than graduates. Five years in, Page says that this is the case. Indeed, some apprentices have advanced faster than graduates.
When JP Morgan began its apprenticeship programme, executives assumed that it would attract only local applications within, say, a 30-mile radius of Bournemouth. However, a third of applicants and successful candidates have come from across the UK. The same pattern emerged when it began hiring apprentices in Canary Wharf.
Page says: “We have been delighted with how positive an impact the apprentices have had. Managers love the attitude these guys and girls come in with. They are very keen to learn, they are grateful for the opportunity and they want to go about setting themselves up for a really strong career here.”
Like other larger employers, the bank is considering how it might extend apprenticeship training after the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, which requires it to pay 0.5 per cent of its annual pay bill, but can reclaim the money from an account for accredited training. “It has acted as an interesting catalyst, both internally at JP Morgan but also from our view looking at apprenticeships more broadly involving various industry groups,” Page says.
“You have lots of people thinking about how they might expand, and that includes us: not just, for example, looking at apprenticeships for school-leavers, but also looking at apprenticeships for graduates and to use them for up-skill and reskill opportunities for existing staff.”
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Case study
Bethany Camphor quit her course at a Russell Group university after finding it insufficiently challenging. Now she is an apprentice with JP Morgan.
Bethany, 20, from the Wirral, Merseyside, spent a year studying English literature at King’s College London.
“I felt I wasn’t challenged enough, I wasn’t busy enough, so I left,” she says.
Initially, she applied to other universities and for internships, but then came across the level 4 apprenticeship in financial services. She applied “on a whim”.
“The further I went on the application process the more I realised how good an opportunity it is. The process itself was more rigorous than anything I had to do to get into any of the top universities.”
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Bethany started in September at JP Morgan’s operations and corporate centre in Bournemouth and works in the trading settlement team.
“I have been given more responsibility than I thought I would be,” she says. “I enjoy coming into work every day.”
She works four days a week; on Fridays she studies. Instead of lectures at King’s College London, she watches a live online lecture and spends the rest of the day studying. She has an exam in several weeks, so she spends an hour before and after work each day in extra study, and two hours at weekends too.
All her friends are still at university, which she says was the expected path at the grammar school she attended. “To come off it is scary and people see that,” she says, “but when they hear what I am doing they tend to be surprised and then really, really interested.”
And what of her love of literature?
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“I do my best to read every night,” Bethany says. “It is still a huge part of my thinking.”
To produce The Times Guide to Higher & Degree Apprenticeships the independent market research company High Fliers Research contacted more than 250 employers of school-leavers, graduates and young professionals during December 2017.
The research identified how many higher or degree apprentices each organisation recruited in the previous 12 months on courses that lead to level 4 qualifications or above.
Employers who offer training schemes outside the apprenticeship frameworks: by sponsoring places on existing undergraduate courses; providing their own degree courses at university; or through programmes leading to professional qualifications were included.
Advanced or intermediate apprenticeships aimed at 16-plus school-leavers, which lead to level 2 or 3 qualifications, have not been included. The 50 organisations that recruited the most sixth-form school-leavers for higher or degree apprenticeships, or comparable schemes, took on more than 4,600 trainees in 2017.