Since when did retail stores offer apprenticeships?

[Soubriquet]

A well known shop on the high street is offering apprenticeships at £6 an hour.

They are boasting about offering a customer service practitioner skill level 2 or retail diploma level 2

Since when did people need these sort of skills in the work place?

Are they just trying to cheap out on wages?

It's nothing new - department stores offered apprenticeships years ago. In the 1970s I knew a lady who was then elderly who had served an apprenticeship in a West End store. Can't remember which one. That would have been in the 1920s or early 1930s. The young girl apprentices, who would have been aged 14+, lived in a dormitory at the top of the store, with all meals provided and a matron to look after them.

@Soubriquet

I honestly didn’t expect this sort of apprenticeships.

In places that actually require a skill like mechanics, child care, yeah.

But not a high street shop.

How odd

I started a career in M&S many, many years ago. And to start in anything you often started in the store.

Lots and lots of training, both off and on the job. Lots of skills taught and learnt.

a) they had particular ways of doing things
b) not everyone is a natural with customer service

There are very few skills needed to be a basic retail assistant - and I say that as someone who worked in retail for a decade and did over five years at the "bottom of the ladder".

Maybe that's why I still have to show sales assistants how to fold garments properly, as I don't expect to spend reasonable sums of money to have everything screwed up and shoved in the bag.

Apparently it's no longer part of their training

Only here is this not a thing.

Try telling someone in Ireland, Sweden etc that bar staff are unskilled.

Having apprenticeships, practical qualifications for many 'unskilled' work has proven to be a good thing in many countries. Not least knowing that the kid who serves you your beer, shots has some idea what the fuck they are doing and won't serve you a cocktail in dry ice that will kill you!

But hey! We're Brits and, from individual through employers to governments, we don't value that kind of work!

Most of these apprenticeship schemes are absolute exploitative scams. Take nursery chains, they’ll employ apprentices on a pittance but people the same age can sign up with an agency as unqualified and get £10+/hour. If you’re halfway decent, the chain will take you on and pay for your level 2/3 anyway.

This shows how little knowledge you have regarding retail. Trainee manager apprenticeships in retails have been around since l left school over 35 yrs ago, huge supermarkets need lots of managers for all their various departments and not just shop floor, plus one general manager of whole store who could be responsible for hundreds of staff including dot com drivers and admin.

Not least knowing that the kid who serves you your beer, shots has some idea what the fuck they are doing and won't serve you a cocktail in dry ice that will kill you!

Not quite as drastic, but I once had to tell a barman in a pub not to stick the bottle of red wine I had just bought in an ice bucket! (And he wasn't a kid.)

It absolutely is a way for them to undercut wages and exploit young staff.

An apprenticeship in retail is complete nonsense. Yes, professional development courses and training for specific is needed for a retail job- but for the past 50 years this has managed to be done as part of general employment for retail workers up and down the country.

This way just means they get to pay them less and there is an expectation for studying for these skills instead of paying them to learn them as part of a working day.

@Moonface123

This shows how little knowledge you have regarding retail. Trainee manager apprenticeships in retails have been around since l left school over 35 yrs ago, huge supermarkets need lots of managers for all their various departments and not just shop floor, plus one general manager of whole store who could be responsible for hundreds of staff including dot com drivers and admin.

You’d get paid minimum wage, at least- to complete these traineeships.

What OP is describing is exploitation, and a brilliant way to get young people filling a labour gap for sub minimum wage.

I worked in retail for ten years, including management training- all of my training was done as part of a working shift and for the same wage everyone else is on!

Our local authority pulled all their lower grade job vacancies and readvertised them as apprenticeships.

It meant they could get women with very good degrees (and often single parents to small children) to work for £6 an hour rather than the £24-28k the same job would have been a month earlier.

One that stuck in my in particular was where the apprentice was providing a service to schools for which the school would be charged somewhere around £65 for less than an hour on site. Somebody else not on the apprenticeship scheme was being paid £34 an hour to do exactly the same thing. With the same qualifications and at the point of recruitment, no experience.

It's just exploitation of ways to get around NMW legislation, exploitation of people desperate for jobs, exploitation of women in particular and exploitation of disabled people, as they are even less likely to get a permanent, reasonably paid job offer outside the apprenticeship schemes. And somebody in the local authority will be getting great appraisals and massive pay rises in addition to their already massive salary for 'reducing costs' as a result.

If you employ apprentices you have to show that the skills they are learning are new, and you have to set aside a minimum of 20% of working hours specifically for learning new skills. It all has to be evidenced, and apprenticeship providers get audited and also inspected by Ofsted.

Not saying there aren't unscrupulous employers/providers exploiting loopholes but there's a structure there designed to bring people into all sorts of careers through supported, paid training and hands-on experience. You can't just call someone an apprentice and pay them peanuts (or if you do you'll get caught).

@Suprima

It absolutely is a way for them to undercut wages and exploit young staff.

An apprenticeship in retail is complete nonsense. Yes, professional development courses and training for specific is needed for a retail job- but for the past 50 years this has managed to be done as part of general employment for retail workers up and down the country.

This way just means they get to pay them less and there is an expectation for studying for these skills instead of paying them to learn them as part of a working day.

I agree. I worked in Costa about a decade ago. All the training was on the job.

A few years ago I noticed they were advertising for apprentices. Making a coffee hasn't become so much more complicated since I did it that it suddenly requires a great deal of study. They've just found a way to pay people less. it's exploitative.

@VikingNorthUtsire

If you employ apprentices you have to show that the skills they are learning are new, and you have to set aside a minimum of 20% of working hours specifically for learning new skills. It all has to be evidenced, and apprenticeship providers get audited and also inspected by Ofsted.

Not saying there aren't unscrupulous employers/providers exploiting loopholes but there's a structure there designed to bring people into all sorts of careers through supported, paid training and hands-on experience. You can't just call someone an apprentice and pay them peanuts (or if you do you'll get caught).

It's still a means for employers to use cheap labour, though, even if you do account for 20% of those hours being "training".

You can do an office admin apprenticeship.

When I was in recruitment we’d have young people coming in, paying the travel costs for central London, to basically do all our basic administration that the company owner didn’t want to pay a full wage for.
When their apprenticeship was done, they’d leave with zero hope of a job offer after.

I imagine retail apprenticeships would be similar.
Stocking shelves, unpacking boxes, cleaning etc

[quote SecretVictoria]@Maverickess depends on the shop and how much you’re spending, surely? I nipped in Superdrug today and was quite happy to have the 10 quids worth of stuff chucked in a bag, scan my card and leave. Last week, I went in the Apple store and got a new iPad, I expected a bit more in the way of customer service (and got it) as I was spending over £500. As long as staff aren’t actively rude/ignore me, I don’t mind.

I don’t think an apprenticeship is appropriate in all roles.[/quote]
Yeah I think it does make a difference to some people, but if in general customers want increasingly higher levels of service relative even to what they're spending, then companies are going to choose the cheapest option of doing that and an apprenticeship is probably cheaper for the company than investing in training in house.
Many unskilled occupations aren't actually unskilled, it's more like the skills they do need aren't valued - yet when they are lacking and customers feel affected by that lack, suddenly they're important enough to get cross about.

It's literally for cheap labour. Nothing else

In the mid 90s I had a summer job in retail. I was on just over £3 per hour. There were people on YTS doing the same job but getting £35 a week for 37.5 hrs, so less than £1 an hour!

Ds did a retail management apprenticeship and was on £30k pa at age 20 when he completed it. He started off as a £9ph part-time retail assistant assistant when he was 17 and worked his way up.

I'm Retail manager. Of course there are apprenticeships

They also do teach skills

Why are people assuming retail jobs don't involve a level of skill? There's lots to learn....we teach more than the basics

I've known quite a few people on what you would probably term pointless apprenticeships. One was a lady who needed to get back to work outside the home after 30 years of sahp&caring. She had almost no digital skills etc so I doubt she'd have gotten another role so easily. I also know some younger people who were very shy quiet unconfident etc & a couple of people with mild learning disabilities who had struggled to get any qualifications at school. Not everyone can pick up all the job skills they need in one weekend of training.

Also....your average school leaver these days (we are finding this across our large company) has anxiety/mental health issues

As managers we are spending more time with people sorting problems that were not as prevalent a few years ago

Your average shop floor worker won't know the ins and outs of sales,targets, merchandising,audits,hr process, inbound schedules,vendor details etc etc

We show our apprentices all this and more.... but we pay full pay

It'll partly be because of the apprenticeship levy.

Watched a documentary on this a while back. An absolute con for the so called apprentice. Next we're one of the worst examples, once apprentice time was out they would be offered if lucky a 16hr week job. Other examples of apprenticeships off of gov. Site. Apprentice fish fryer, laundry worker, superdrug assistant not a real trade among them, frigging disgrace youngsters still getting treated like shit no better than the Yop scheme 40yr ago.

@SaxendaSummer

I'm Retail manager. Of course there are apprenticeships

They also do teach skills

Why are people assuming retail jobs don't involve a level of skill? There's lots to learn....we teach more than the basics

I used to work retail so it's not an assumption, it's experience lol.

Yes, there are things you need to learn to do your job but that's the kind of thing you learn during your probation period - you really don't need to take an apprenticeship to work as as shelf-stacker in Tesco.

If you want to go into management then that's different but a good workplace will train you up on the job (and pay you properly) - an apprenticeship is pretty much just a way to train people up on the cheap.

I did an apprenticeship with a large supermarket in 91, they sponsored me through uni and I had to work for them 6 weeks each holiday which I would have done anyway as I was a student with them through gcse and a levels

They paid 500 a term to study which was pretty decent back then and obviously paid normal management rate for work. I lasted less than a year with them after uni, the expectation of 12 -14 hour days plus travelling to which branch they wanted you at was not sustainable, I was leaving at 5 am and getting in just before midnight - crazy.

Luckily I didnt have to repay anything, just after I left, another trainee died due to exhaustion

Did I learn any skills? Probably not but it made me rethink what I wanted to do and paid for my beer and clubbing through uni 😂