The BSGA Corner


The importance of apprenticeships W


David Allen, owner of Allen Signs and president of the BSGA, highlights the importance of apprenticeships and developing a younger generation in the industry.


ell, well, well, yet another new PM what is it now? Seven in a decade.


From a business perspective, all it’s


really done is provide a very unstable climate in which to operate, but one thing that has suffered is the framework for our apprenticeships; all the political changes mean we’re going to see changes yet or if it survives. The encouraging thing is that this


leader has said that apprenticeships should have equal value with university degrees, something I’m sure everyone would welcome. In a craft-based industry such as ours, all we’ve ever needed is a hands-on, experience-led qualification. Prior to this most recent change, we had been working towards establishing a Level 2 apprenticeship, and I hope it will still come in time, as that would be a real benefit and be a visible sign that apprenticeships really do have an equal footing. I’m also a strong believer that while we need basic functioning Maths and English, most, if not all, the rest can be


learnt on the job with college support. Counterintuitive to the current policy, of course, which is to control everything, but I believe business should and must be left to get on with it. A lot of construction companies are


tightening up on requirements for staff to be correctly trained for their tasks, so training of any sort should be welcomed. Without formal recognition, though, how valuable are they? Most sign companies are smaller, owner-operated businesses, so there might be a reluctance to invest; once trained, the reality is you often see them walk out the door, only to return as a contractor.


Reliance on contractors Our industry always relied on contractors of one sort or another. A lot of this is due to the nature of the way we operate, so you’d think having a qualification would work really well for us. And we are blessed with a few training


providers who offer a wide range of courses from general training to product specific courses, and they all have merits.


As a director of the trade association,


though, I wish we could combine these and have an overall qualification. For example, you could do a baseline introduction course, may be if you were going on to be a vehicle wrapper, do a course for that; if you were just going to do general applications, maybe there are options there too. With a little collaboration from


all involved, we could have an industry-backed qualification consisting of a few parts, each expertly delivered by a variety of providers to an agreed specification that could have some real value to operators and purchasers alike, and if the bar was set correctly maybe staying employed might offer a real alternative. But this is where it goes awry; we


want the best of both worlds: we want to pick up labour when we need it and not have it on the payroll when we don’t. So, we are left in this no man’s land of having to find workarounds to achieve things like CSCS cards, because the approved methods are too time-consuming and costly.


Looking forward At BSGA we exist to bring all the elements of our trade together, to improve the environment for all stakeholders be that employers, employees and buyer alike, so maybe now is the time the industry helps us to help them and look at what we can all do as a collective, to join the dots as it were of all the training programmes to stitch them together to create a scheme that provides real value to employers, assurance to purchasers and knowledge to employees. It’s understandable that, as employers,


we all from time to time reflect on what appears to be wasted money when that golden employee walks out the door. But maybe if we prove the value of the training, it might make it more difficult to operate as a one-man band subcontractor without having the relevant trade qualifications; other trades do it, maybe we should too before we have it forced on us.


| 40 | September/October 2026 www.signupdate.co.uk


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