Website promotes apprenticeship vacancies

New website to help local employers fill their apprenticeship vacancies

Skills Group has worked with local company, Altitude, to launch a new website promoting apprenticeship vacancies to young people.

The new dedicated recruitment website, www.apprenticeships4me.com, has been designed to help young people make an informed choice about becoming an apprentice, and then finding a vacancy to match their career aspirations.

“The launch of our new website is particularly timely,” said Skills Group Apprenticeship Manager, Mandy Kerslake, “as the increase in the national minimum wage for apprentices to £3.30 per hour has heightened interest in apprenticeship opportunities. This dedicated recruitment website has been designed to showcase the top local employers that Skills Group works with, and to promote the vacancies they have, while also helping a young person to make the decision to start an apprenticeship.

“All our research shows that it is the employers that attract potential recruits, and our new apprenticeships4me website really highlights the many companies that Skills Group works with.”

Altitude Managing Director, Miles Noble, said “The brief from Skills Group was a fantastic challenge – to develop a website that promotes the various employers the company works with but is appealing to young people making a life-changing decision about what to do with their future, and giving them numerous ways of searching through the many opportunities open to them.

“Working with the Skills Group team, we invested a lot of time in developing a complex search functionality behind the scenes to ensure that the consumer-facing site was clean, simple and, most importantly, easy to use to ensure that prospective apprentices could find their ideal apprenticeship.”

Skills Group Marketing Manager, Fay Steer, said: “Developing a new website is a big investment for any organisation, both in terms of the actual cost but also the time involved in pulling together the brief, consulting with colleagues at every step of the way, creating all the new content – text and imagery – and testing the features and navigation with the target audience.

“The brief was to develop a more interactive website to help us fill our employer vacancies. The site needed to convince young people and their parents of the benefits of undertaking an apprenticeship, highlighting the many successful young people who have already chosen this route.

“Miles at Altitude has made this a surprisingly smooth project, and although I didn’t actually believe we’d make it, we did go live on the day Miles said we would!”

Nickayla Lyle, a child care student with Skills Group, said: “I was showing a friend the new apprenticeships4me website while I looked for a job with a local nursery. It is so much easier to use – I can search by type of vacancy and the location, and then all the information I need is there to help me decide whether to apply or not.”

Altitude is an award-winning, Plymouth-based digital design agency who specialise in website design and development and is part of the Knowledge Collective. Based at the Royal William Yard, the Knowledge Collective is a talented group of like-minded designers and marketers who are all specialists in their chosen field of work. By combining their shared vision, skills, knowledge and experience with that of the client, they consistently develop and deliver creative solutions that add value to clients’ businesses.

Skills Group is a locally-based independent training provider with centres in Plymouth, Newton Abbot and Exeter. The company works with employers across the region to offer apprenticeships in Business Administration, Care and Early Years, Construction, Engineering and Automotive, Hairdressing, and Sport and Leisure, and Teaching and Education, and currently has nearly 200 vacancies.

The new dedicated recruitment website can be found at www.apprenticeships4me.com