British Gas engages future talent with apprenticeship scheme

Citation

Willsher, C. (2009), "British Gas engages future talent with apprenticeship scheme", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 8 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2009.37208fab.008

British Gas engages future talent with apprenticeship scheme

Article Type: Rewards From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 6

Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in rewards

Carole WillsherRecruitment and Diversity Specialist at British Gas.

British Gas is quite unique. When it comes to the recruitment of new people onto our apprenticeship scheme we don’t struggle to get enough people to apply. Our challenge is getting the right people to apply – the best of the best.

Like many engineering organizations, the traditional engineer workforce at British Gas is white and male. For some years now we have been working on achieving a good representation of the UK working population, and in particular we want to continually aim to improve diversity and address the under-representation of women and ethnic minority groups.

We recognized that engaging with young people – our future workforce – was the key to genuinely altering the stereotypical beliefs that have been developed about careers in engineering. But it’s about more than just changing perceptions; it’s also about preparing young people at the pre-employment stage so that they enter the workplace with the right attitude and the right skill set. The financial crisis together with an ever-increasing skills deficit, an ageing workforce, increasingly complex technology and rising consumer expectations means that there has never been a more important time to think long term about the future skills required.

The value of apprenticeships

British Gas currently plans to continue to recruit a significant number of apprentices over the next five years. They are an effective means of filling skills gaps and provide an opportunity for us to harness fresh new talent. Our experience has shown that apprenticeships are now being seen by young people as a real alternative to university. Even after finishing a university course, more and more people are seeing an apprenticeship as a valid career choice as they recognize the market value of the skills they gain through this type of training.

Although over 90 per cent of people who start apprenticeships with British Gas pass their exams first time, we are not resting there. There is still more work to be done and we are working hard to ensure applicants fully understand what the apprenticeship scheme entails and what a career within British Gas involves so that only serious individuals apply.

While the downturn has meant that some companies are cutting the number of apprenticeship places they offer, this is shortsighted. It is important to take a long-term view and, in fact, the current economic climate presents a great opportunity for us to attract high caliber people who may not have previously considered the apprenticeship route but who now see British Gas as a real career option. Ninety percent of our apprentices stay with British Gas for at least five years, which also makes it a very cost-effective recruitment tool and long-term it will be critical to changing perceptions about a career with British Gas as more and more female engineers become qualified and take on apprentices of their own.

Creating a future talent pipeline

While apprenticeships are aimed at people of any age, we realized that to really be successful in changing perceptions, we needed to target young people at the pre-employment stage, specifically. Since 2007, we have been working in partnership with b-live, an organization that works with secondary schools to support young people (aged 12 to 19 years) through their personal, vocational and educational development. b-live.com provides a secure social networking platform and enables us to engage with over 172,000 young people on an ongoing basis.

By working with b-live, we are able to reach out to young people at 12 or 13 years old and start to build within them the possibility that British Gas offers a worthwhile career opportunity. Because b-live encourages young people to think early on about their career choices, we can be sure that if they apply for a British Gas apprenticeship in the future, it is something that they really want and have thought deeply about.

The partnership also allows us to reach a wider audience including females and ethnic minorities and by using innovative tools in schools, we have an opportunity to engage with these audiences and make them think about careers in areas they may not previously have considered, such as engineering.

Reaching recruitment goals

We have already had significant success in targeting young people through b-live, having recently been rated as one of the most popular employers amongst b-livers. Over 11,500 users now belong to the British Gas Talent Pipeline on b-live.com (the average for other employers is 3,500 users). And the quality of potential candidates increased by 17 percent during 2008, resulting in ten times the amount of young people with the “right” skills for an apprenticeship with British Gas, which means we are well on the way to meeting our goal of recruiting “the best of the best.”

But in order to be truly effective, it’s about more than simply supporting careers advice and education for young people, it’s about raising our profile with this audience and demonstrating in more imaginative and creative ways that we are serious about changing the demographics of our workforce.

Building the employer brand

Even in this difficult market, attracting new talent and engaging prospective talent should always be a priority. Engaging young people, while they are still in school, is also about building our employer brand. By encouraging them to think now about British Gas and the career opportunities available, they are more likely to be receptive to working for us in the future when they are ready to enter the workplace.

We also recognize that if we want to be seen as an employer of choice by everyone, regardless of their age, background or gender, we also need to formally look at the structure of our workforce and the flexibility that we can offer in the form of lifestyle rosters, part-time working, flexible working hours and so on. We service customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which means that we can be creative with the hours that people work. Already, we are seeing that our flexibility is having a real impact on the types of people applying to British Gas. By formalizing our approach here we can show our future workforce that we can offer work-life balance and genuine long-term career opportunities, especially for workers with family or other commitments outside of work.

Changing perceptions

Targeting young people is also the key to really getting our message out there, showing them that the engineering industry is changing and moving away from being such a male dominated industry. For example, last year, almost 13 per cent of our recruits onto the training programs were women, compared to just 4 per cent in 2006.

When you consider the numbers of women in technical roles in our marketplace, we are already in a good position. In 2003, only 1 per cent of our entire workforce consisted of women, today that figure is over 2 per cent. But we want to be better. Through our work with b-live and our wider diversity initiatives, we want to see greater numbers of women in technical leadership roles and senior management positions.

We are also realistic and understand that change will not happen overnight. This is a long-term program and part of a wider talent strategy, which reflects our long-term skills needs and which will enable us to evolve and respond to changing market conditions. For British Gas, our initiatives to engage and excite our potential future workforce are a critical and key part of that strategy.

About the author

Carole Willsher is a Recruitment and Diversity Specialist at British Gas. After leaving the Metropolitan University, she joined British Gas as part of the HR directorate and was instrumental in introducing flexible-working patterns to the Eastern region. Throughout her 25-plus years with British Gas she has worked in British Gas Services, PR and marketing. In her current role, along with her team, she designed and implemented the successful diversity strategy, increasing the number of women within the work force. Carole Willsher can be contacted at: carole.willsher@centrica.co.uk