Taking on an apprentice is the natural path you take as you achieve the goals to grow your business. If choosing the right fit for your business isn’t hard enough there are layers of paperwork, responsibility and training that come along with the benefits of having an apprentice.
It is comforting to know East Coast Apprenticeships (ECA) has a plan to guide you through the entire process. Identifying the right candidate is just the start. Here are the top five considerations we have put together for you to consider when employing an apprentice.
- Recruitment – Your business is peaking and you need to hire staff. You do not have the time, energy or resources to manage an apprentice onboarding process. We have the process and procedures to identify your hiring needs before you move towards an interview process. This saves you valuable time and avoids costly hiring errors.
- Standards – Filtering through applicants to find one that meets your standards ensures a long relationship with you as the host and the employee.
- Costs – Do you know the costs involved? It is not just the hourly rate and there are many entitlements involved when employing an apprentice. Wages, training costs, superannuation and particular trades include travel and wet days (construction trades) these costs are inclusive in one hourly charge out rate with ECA. This leaves out the stress of calculating extra entitlements and makes you aware of the upfront costs.
- A Training Plan – does your organisation have the full range of tasks and equipment to deliver all the competencies within an apprentice’s training package? ECA can assist with placing an apprentice and ensure they get the right exposure to different skillsets by rotating between Host employers if required.
- College – is the key factor of driving an apprentice to the end of their apprenticeship, you will need to find and organise an AASN (Australian Apprenticeship Support Network) or RTO (Registered Training Organisation) company to provide training days as well as booking these days in. Sounds difficult, but East Coast Apprenticeships select and arrange the college (RTO) to prepare the Training Plan for the qualification (eg Carpentry, Boilermaking Fabrication etc) and then manage all the bookings in conjunction with the host to make sure the college blocks work in with projects/peak workload periods etc.
Taking action such as following our five steps when employing an apprentice will help you avoid failure, now and in the future. A positive experience with employing an apprentice will see your business go to the next level without pain, frustration and cost. Let ECA guide you the entire way.