Businesses are constantly looking to employ the right candidates to fill available positions and strengthen their team. Unfortunately, finding the most suitable candidate can be a very long and costly process for many companies. Despite best endeavours and how much you may pay a recruiter, you don’t always get the right person for the job.
Questioning HR directors and reviewing many job specifications, everybody seems to be looking for experience as if it’s a precursor for success. Often for that person to fail to deliver because although they had experience, they perhaps lacked in more important traits such as drive, energy, passion or commitment.
Businesses looking for growth need to refresh their view of how to develop their team by investing in new, creative, committed, energetic and hungry to learn people and teach how their business works in order to realise long term objectives. Experience still plays an important role as your more skilled team members pass on their knowledge but today it’s more important than ever to develop from within.
At Cloud4 Computers, we decided to work with The Apprentice Academy when we launched our apprentice recruitment program to help us continue to develop our business in a rapidly changing business environment, particularly in the field of marketing which has changed dramatically in just a few short years since the advent of digital and social media.
Since being founded in 2009, our business has consistently seen the benefits of hiring a young, motivated and knowledgeable people across all areas of the business and using our skilled staff to develop them as we need in what is a still and new and growing industry – Cloud Computing. In fact, our own Operations Director joined the business as an apprentice in 2009! So what benefits have we seen from our apprentices?
Committed and energetic team
To grow and develop any business you need a team that’s on-board with your goals and objectives. Growth and even survival over the last few years takes energy and commitment with everybody working together to achieve a solid plan. Taking an apprentice on board gives your business an opportunity to shape their development and working practices in line with your own business objectives, producing a more agile and cohesive team.
Improving business agility
The world and business within it is changing faster than at any time in history. Across most industries the methods we used only 5 years ago to develop a business, win and keep customers are now obsolete. Never was it truer that the customer is always right, as today they have so much power over whether your brand will succeed or fail.
Today’s businesses need to adopt and keep up with the latest marketing trends which are driven like never before by consumer behaviour. The world is being driven by the dramatic increased in the use of digital and social media.
By nature of their generation, many apprentices are fluent in the Internet of Things (IoT), familiar with new methods, gadgets and technology inventions, they can provide the business with additional insight into the use of technology and how that can improve the business.
Generation Y are already tech savvy and commercially aware!
Generation Y is emerging as the biggest demographic in the workplace, at the same time as many of the baby boomers and generation X are leaving the workplace! So the time to invest in the future is now, today’s young people are already more tech savvy, social media fluent and commercially aware than any other in history.
They are the generation who have driven content based marketing because they are the generation who consumed it. Today’s apprentices come with practical knowledge of the current social media, blogging or video marketing platforms for instance.
For our own business working in the rapidly growing Cloud Business Solutions market, an apprentice scheme was ideal and has given us access to the innovation we’ve needed to succeed. In times when the cloud and virtualisation of software and infrastructure is becoming more influential to competitive advantage, it is important to have a team that is modern, lives modern and has a good eye for what’s coming next!
The business landscape is changing quickly, businesses need to be agile and adapt to succeed. It’s so important to make sure we all invest in the future and the people who will be driving, managing and running our businesses in the next 10 years’ time.
It’s also as risk free as employment comes, with all of the support available from great training providers like The Apprentice Academy and all of the support financially accessible from government, there has never been a better time to develop the next generation as the workforce we’ll need.
Author
Kasia Jazdzewska – Digital Marketing Executive
Phil Donoghue – Managing Director of Cloud4Computers Ltd