Food for thought: Foundation Apprenticeships
Building the foundations of a good workforce
by Dr Jonathan Wilkin, Abertay University
Attracting good people to work in your business is hard work. And it’s getting harder.
With a diminishing pool of people looking for work in Scotland, it’s little wonder that it’s having such an impact on the food & drink sector – which employs 5% of the national workforce.
Our businesses need motivated, well-trained and experienced people. But if they don’t exist, we can’t conjure them up.
Or can we? What if I said you could access talent, enthusiasm and motivation and train those people to your precise requirements?
But you need to step forward to grasp this opportunity and start engaging with the next generation of talent. And there is no better way to do that than through the Foundation Apprenticeship network.
Through our national skills body, you can tap into a source of engaged and interested young people, introduce them to your business, task them with a project and I can guarantee you will be amazed by what you discover.
I can say that because a few months ago, I witnessed the results in person.
We had offered a placement at Abertay University to two willing senior pupils from Perth High School towards the end of last year, through the Foundation Apprentices being organized by UHI Moray. We can do things like that – our process lab is used for pilot-scale food manufacture and is unique in Scotland.
We tasked them with producing potato milk. Over six weeks, they came in every Friday and worked on the project. And then they presented back what they’d done, discovered and produced.
They shared the stage with three pupils from Moray and another from Kinross. The team of three – from Keith, Buckie and Forres – had been working on a “special sauce” for Fochabers family food business Baxters. And the Fife pupil had been beavering away at Innovate Foods in Kirkcaldy, creating a new cheesy bite.
I was blown away by what these clever young people had achieved. Their determination and innovation was incredible, and what was even better was seeing the spark that this project had lit inside them for finding their place in our industry.
There is no cost to your business, all it needs is a smart investment of some time and resource. View it as a longer term investment in growing your business that should streamline your recruitment while supporting young people.
What do the young people get out of their Foundation Apprentice? Their eyes opened to the opportunities of a fantastic career in food and drink, and a qualification that’s the equivalent of two Highers.
It’s by opening your door – and your mind – to this opportunity, you can inspire the next generation of talent. And you can create the pipeline of motivated, well-trained and experienced people to work in your business.
Dr Jonathan Wilkin is a senior lecturer in New Product Development at Abertay University and the programme tutor for Food and Consumer Science BSc (Hons).
Find out more about Foundation Apprenticeships here.