How an apprenticeship can be the route to a successful and rewarding career

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay has recently made headlines with this call for the school leaving age to be lowered to 14, but the latest figures on higher pass rates – particularly coming during national apprenticeship week - are also a good case in point.

The number of young people receiving five Highers – often considered the gold standard to secure a university place - has now fallen to its lowest level in a decade, leading to criticism from opposition parties and commentators.

Certainly, there is every reason to be concerned about this development. For many pupils, a university education is not only a formative academic but also personal experience. It obviously improves knowledge and encourages new skills, but it also gives young people what can often be their first taste of real independence and responsibility. Equally, one of the great attractions of Scotland as a place for businesses to invest is its highly-skilled workforce, with any decline in the number of Scottish students attending university likely to have a knock-on impact on our future economic success.

Yet amid all the understandable concern about the decline in the number of young people receiving five Highers, we also risk missing a piece of good news: that the number of young people undertaking vocational courses has tripled and now makes up more than 10 per cent of school leavers’ qualifications.

Last week was Scottish Apprenticeship Week, a nationwide campaign aiming to draw attention to the transformative power of apprenticeships to individuals, businesses and the wider economy. Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with many talented apprentices and have seen the huge value they bring to businesses and the wider economy. But more than that, I have seen the benefits they bring to the apprentices themselves.

Of course, some people still choose to dismiss such experiences or view them as somehow lesser than their academic counterparts. Others still cling to the belief that a university education is the only way to secure a meaningful, well-paid career. Such views are not only outdated but fundamentally wrong.

They are also at odds with the prevailing experience in other countries. In many European countries, apprenticeships are an integral part of the education system which leads to a culture that values vocational training more than in Scotland and the wider UK. Austria’s well-developed apprenticeship system, which includes a training guarantee, sees around 40 per cent of young people enter the apprenticeship system from the age of 15 onwards.

Scotland’s financial and professional services industry offers some of the highest-skill, highest-wage jobs available in the country. It provides roles in everything from AI to climate change to investment, as well as opportunities for travel and first-class benefits. Many people would therefore assume that you must have a degree – perhaps even more than one degree – to be eligible to work in such an attractive sector, but nothing could be further from the truth.

For fast-growing, technology focussed sectors like ours, apprenticeships have become indispensable as a means of addressing skills gaps, boosting productivity and ensuring our industry better reflects the communities we operate in.

As an industry, we already offer more than 400 apprenticeships for people without university degrees each year, and that number continues to grow. Meanwhile, companies across the sector are making ever more ambitious and concerted efforts to attract talent regardless of background or education. The days of the school tie and the old boys’ club are vanishing fast. Financial services firms now have active school leaver programmes and work with charities like Future Asset and Investment 20/20 to attract talent regardless of background and education.

Scotland’s highly skilled workforce is one of the primary reasons international financial and professional services firms choose to locate here, so ensuring we equip people with the skills of the future is key to unlocking the growth and investment we all want to see.

At Scottish Financial Enterprise our getinto.finance hub aims to encourage more people, particularly those from under-represented or disadvantaged backgrounds, to learn about how they can use their skills in ways they might not have considered, as well as demystifying pathways into the sector. We think people are missing out on a rewarding career in business because they don’t think they have the skills or qualifications to succeed, and we want to play our role in helping address that.

We have also recently embarked on a programme of school engagement in an effort to shine a light on the range of pathways into our sector and ensure we attract people from all parts of the society we represent. The career opportunities - as well as the skills required to take advantage of them – have changed hugely in recent years and we want to ensure the advice young people are getting reflects that and helps them fulfil their potential.

Later this week, I will pay a visit to my old school, Musselburgh Grammar, to give a talk to young people about a career in financial and professional services as part of Apprenticeship Week. Having most certainly not achieved five Highers at school, the opportunity to gain vocational qualifications after I joined the financial services industry at the age of 17 went a long way to helping me build my career.

I hope many of those I speak with go on to get those coveted five Highers and a place at one of our world-class universities. But I hope they also take advantage of the fantastic vocational qualifications we now have on offer here in Scotland too, and the many fantastic and rewarding careers they can bring.