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Hospitality and Catering
This Apprenticeship covers a range of occupations within hospitality and catering, one of the largest industries in the country.
Hospitality and catering covers work in restaurants, hotels, cafés, pubs, and contract caterers – it also supplies other industries with food and drink. Schools, colleges, hospitals and large businesses nearly always have canteens and catering staff, too.
Apprentices will have the choice of one of six career paths within the industry. If you’re interested in service, you could train as waiting staff and learn how to serve customers, or train in drinks service – one of the fastest growing sub-sectors.
Apprentices interested in cookery could either train as a chef in a restaurant, or learn how to cook on a large scale for institutions like the NHS or armed forces.
Apprentices more interested in the hospitality side of the sector could work in a hotel reception area; learn to run a B&B or youth hostel; or keep a hotel crisp and clean.
Successful completion of the Advanced Apprenticeship could lead to management or supervisory roles.
Customer Service
This Apprenticeship teaches you the skills to provide excellent customer service, and can be applied to hundreds of job roles across many different sectors, from government to telecommunications.
However, most customer service apprentices work in retail, financial services, call centres, hospitality, or sport and recreation.
Good customer service is key to the success of any business or organisation. It’s one of those useful skills that’s found all over the place and covers all the extras that make a customer’s experience better.
As a customer service apprentice, you’ll probably work at the front end of an employer’s business activities and regularly assist customers. Duties will vary between sectors, but in most cases you’ll be making sure that customers are dealt with in a positive, reliable and pleasant way – whether that’s by offering advice, answering questions or handling complaints.
To properly assist customers, you’ll need clear and up-to-date knowledge of your organisation’s products and services. You’ll also need to be able to communicate with all sorts of people.
Completing this Apprenticeship is a way of providing evidence of skills that will serve you well in virtually any industry – so it’s a very good way to move forward, even if you’re still undecided about your future career.
Business Administration
This Apprenticeship is about playing an important support role within a business or organisation.
Administrators handle the day-to-day tasks in an office and make sure things run smoothly – 97% of employers say that effective administration is essential to their business, so they do a crucial job.
The term ‘administration’ covers roles that involve organising people and resources, including, executive assistants, secretaries, administration assistants, data entry clerks and office juniors. Without them, information would be hard to find, meetings would be missed and businesses would be less productive.
As a business and administration apprentice, your exact duties will depend on your employer. It’s likely that you’ll be working with a team or member of staff to handle various tasks. You may be typing up board meeting documents, putting financial information together in spreadsheets, sending the daily post, or faxing and photocopying confidential documents. This sort of work requires a strong sense of responsibility, accuracy and attention to detail.
One of the great things about business and administration is that you can work almost anywhere. With your transferable skills, you could be working in a record company or a charity. Administration roles are also an excellent starting point to move into management once you have more experience.
Retail
Retail covers a host of businesses from market stalls and independent shops to national chains and large superstores.
This Apprenticeship covers a range of skills that can be used across this vast sector.
As an apprentice, your role will depend on your employer – you could be assisting customers on the sales floor of a high street store or handling their purchases. Alternatively, you could be working in a specialist department and become a product expert able to help with specific queries.
An artistic flare could point you in the direction of visual merchandising, helping to create window and in-store displays. Or you could work behind the scenes in stock handling; ensuring products are received in the correct quantities and appropriately stored.
On the Advanced Apprenticeship, your training will focus on a more specific role to gain greater skills in your preferred specialty. You will handle more responsibility and gain important management skills.
From organising displays to learning the crucial aspects of management, the skills gained from the Retail Apprenticeship are transferable to all retail companies. With a young workforce, the UK’s retail sector is vibrant and offers many opportunities for early career progression.
Team Leading and Management
This Apprenticeship can be applied across a broad range of sectors and job roles.
Good managers and team leaders are essential to the success of any business, so the skills gained on this Apprenticeship are transferable and valuable.
Learning will be tailored to your industry, but it’s likely you’ll be responsible for the delivery of a service, or how other people carry out their work. You could be working as a shift leader, charge hand, section leader, team leader, floor manager, trainee manager, deputy manager, or supervisor.
On your Apprenticeship in Team Leading, you’ll learn the theories of team leading and how business works. You’ll manage your own workload; lead others; work effectively with other people; and learn how to get your point across through talking and discussion with others.
On the Advanced Apprenticeship in Management, you’ll be able to understand the theories of management, and how to source, understand, present and explain work related figures and calculations.
Depending on the focus of your job, you might learn other skills like how to allocate and check other people’s work; plan and implement change; manage a project or budget; encourage innovation; carry out operational plans; recruit staff; or develop customer service skills.
Cleaning & Support
This Apprenticeship covers many aspects of professional cleaning, from mechanised street cleaning to the maintenance of hard floors.
There’s more to cleaning than most people realise – cleaning staff can sometimes work at crime and accident scenes, or for the National Health Service ensuring cleanliness of hospital wards, waiting rooms and offices. They might even take charge of a large-scale clean-up, like on a festival site.
Training is an important part of this career because cleaners deal with hazardous chemicals, and sometimes with large machinery. They also need to have the right customer care skills as cleaners are often in contact with customers.
As an apprentice, you’ll learn a range of cleaning techniques and skills including health and safety; working effectively with customers and others; and communication skills. Depending on your employer, you might learn how to clean food areas, confined areas, high-risk areas or the inside of passenger transport vehicles.
There are even more specialised skills – you might learn how to operate a street cleaner, or how to carry out maintenance and minor repairs. You might clean specialised electronic equipment, or use a water-fed pole system to clean windows and building façades. A huge range of things need cleaning, so you could find yourself working in a variety of places.
Sales
Selling is apart of our daily activities. We sell our views, our ideas and ourselves to colleagues, clients, bosses, partners and families. And it doesn’t just stop there.
We are often talking with sales people – on the street, in stores and even on the phone. Selling is a very important process – it is the lifeblood of most organisations.
If they do not sell their products or services, companies can easily go out of business. They therefore make sure they recruit promising trainees, give them the best opportunities and hold their good sales people in high esteem.
Good salesmanship involves helping customers to buy a product or service to meet their needs. As a job, this involves meeting people, building relationships, addressing challenges, being creative in offering solutions and thinking independently. As these skills are relevant to many aspects of our daily lives, selling isn’t just a business skill; it’s also a valuable life skill that could help in many circumstances, from ‘selling’ your skills at a job interview to ‘selling’ your ideas during a debate.
As an Apprentice you could find yourself working in a range of sectors. You may be, for example, a sales advisor in a retail store environment, or a membership advisor in a health and fitness club.
On the Advanced Apprenticeship, you could take on a supervisory role as team leader and have the ability to earn higher rates of commission. Ultimately, your goal will be to sell as many of your company’s products and services as possible, while taking into consideration the interests of your clients. Customers are important, and you’ll have to seek out new customers while still looking after the current ones.
Warehousing and Storage
This Apprenticeship deals with the movement and storage of goods, and is an essential part of logistics operations.
However, there’s more to this job than just lifting and moving things around (although it does involve a fair bit of that, so you’ll need to be fit and learn how to lift things properly). You might learn skills in operating specialist machinery to get things onto – and down from – high storage spaces; learn about keeping some goods at low temperatures; and improve your spatial awareness, so that you can quickly and efficiently load objects of different shapes and sizes.
Your duties will depend on your employer, but you could manage stock; audit inventory; keep equipment in good working order; process returned goods; or manage the receipt, storage and dispatch of goods. You might even learn how to maintain the safety of hazardous goods and materials.
Good teamwork is important when you’re working to a tight schedule, such as loading or unloading a lorry that can only wait for a little while before it needs to go on to the next job. You’ll also learn how to maintain health and safety.
On this Advanced Level Apprenticeship, you’ll hold a management role for a logistics company. As an apprentice, your duties may involve transportation, stock control, warehousing, and/or monitoring the flow of goods and materials. You’ll be responsible for the day-to-day running of things and making sure that quality, cost and efficiency of the supply chain meets standards.
You’ll learn a range of skills, which could include monitoring stock and keep records; managing the receipt, storage or dispatch of goods; developing relationships with customers and suppliers; and providing leadership for your team.
Apprenticeship
To complete the Apprenticeship in Warehousing and Storage learners must complete the following components:
Level 2 NVQ in Warehousing and Storage
Level 2 Employment Rights and Responsibilities
Key Skills: Communication Level 1 and Application of Number Level 1
Personal Learning and Thinking Skills
If you think that Warehousing and Storage is the career path for you, contact us now and we will discuss the different options with you to help you decide which apprenticeship will be best for you
