Apprenticeships only work when both apprentices and employers benefit at every stage of the journey.

Allen + Clarke (the consultancy that developed this toolkit) spoke with apprentices and employers across different trades, sectors, and regions. During these conversations, the apprentices and employers explained the key challenges they face in ensuring that both apprentices and employers benefit from apprenticeships. They also explained the practices they use to overcome those challenges.

What Allen + Clarke found was that successful employers used certain practices to ensure that:

• they hired the right apprentices for their business,
• apprentices had the gear they needed to do their jobs well,
• apprentices were well supported and therefore progressed quickly through their trade qualification, and
• apprentices quickly became profitable employees.

This toolkit takes the best practices that employers used to achieve the outcomes for each stage and sets them out in a way that any employer could apply them in their own business.

The tools in this toolkit were tested with employers and apprentices to ensure that they are valuable and practical.

Crucially, none of these tools require you to make an up-front investment before trying them. You can give any of them a go, see for yourself whether they work for your business, and then decide whether you want to keep using them.

Behind the scenes, Allen + Clarke also developed and applied a Theory of Change and mechanisms of change to select what tools would be developed. If you're interested, you can find this on page 47. You can also find the toolkit’s design principles on page 49.