It’s true confession time. I really didn’t enjoy school between the ages of eleven and sixteen. I loved my friends, I really enjoyed playing football and cricket, but I was bored.
So much so that a boy who at eleven years old, who had been told he should be heading for Oxbridge was now in the first year of doing some A levels at school and thinking that he could not face going through another five years of full-time study. Maybe this is why, despite my success in business, I have never been asked back to my school to present to the current pupils?
I was classified as very smart, but I was also very bored. So, I looked at ways that I could leave school and earn some money. I was ambitious, but not in the traditional way. Careers advice was pitiful and nobody in my family had gone to university. At the time we considered ourselves working class and nobody was there to help advise me, but I could read, and I knew I wanted to do something more than my family had, so I looked for an apprenticeship. They were there but they were in more traditional trades. I was good at Maths and Chemistry, I liked working in laboratories, but nobody seemed to offer a Research Scientist Apprenticeship back in 1975 when I was searching.
What was there though was a course of study that took me through ONC, HNC and on to a degree via “day-release”. Laboratory employers were forward thinking. They recognised this path for their staff and within a week of deciding I was going to leave school I had a job working in drugs research and starting on my ONC in Physical Sciences, basically Maths, Physics and Chemistry at Advanced level. I was starting on an eight yearlong path of day release, revising for exams during World cups, European Championships and Olympic games and one day of each week during the academic year being at college or university between the hours of nine am until nine pm and doing homework and writing up laboratory “practical’s” over the weekends or evenings as well.
I say this not to make you feel sorry for me, but because its National Apprenticeship week, and I am a massive supporter of that scheme. It benefits employees and employers. Nowadays, apprenticeships are offered in a huge number of subjects, including digital technology, a subject which is dear to my heart having built and sold businesses in this field myself. I’m an active advisor and non-executive director in at least two technology businesses now and I am pushing both companies to include apprenticeships in their employment portfolio.
For me apprentices come with a proven track record. Someone who has taken advantage of the new degree level apprenticeships feels a lot like me. They have had to show determination and resilience, they have had to plan and manage their time and while studying they have been learning their craft in a very practical way. Working in the industry in which they are becoming qualified.
I employ people and agree to invest in their businesses mainly based on their attitude. When I see someone who has been an apprentice on a list of CVs put under my nose for consideration, I put them on the same pile as the many CV’s I see from people who I like, but did take the Oxbridge route and gain superb degrees. In fact, I look forward to interviewing the people who did their apprenticeships more. I know what I am going to be looking at. Normally it’s a very well rounded, experienced individual ready for the next step in their career. Recently one candidate I interviewed who had followed the apprenticeship route, when I asked why they had taken that route simply said to me. “I wanted real experience, I plan to build my own business and I didn’t want student debt. But I will be with your company, if you employ me, long enough to make a great contribution and maybe you will help me build my own business”. They got the job.
I can’t thank enough Servier Laboratories, Cadbury-Schweppes, FW Woolworth, The Thames Water Authority and Mars, Inc. Managers in each of those businesses reacted well to me saying to them at interview “If you want me you will have to let me continue with my day release”. They gave me the job and supported me when they knew I would be working only four days a week for them. The fifth day was mine to study in. What they knew though was that I would be learning a skill set that would benefit them, they invested in me as much as I invested in my degree.
I was as good a chemist as anybody who had chosen a more traditional university route. At the time, despite employing and supporting me some of these businesses valued the people who had done the more formal route more. Certainly, there were times in my career my lack of a degree in the early part of it prevented my advancement into jobs I was more than capable of doing. When that happened, I chose to move on to alternate employers. Today a modern apprenticeship, from what I see, provides a career path and qualification. What it also gives the apprentice is choices and freedom to act. That is all an entrepreneur, or a future entrepreneur really needs when they first start.
People tell me I am a glowing example of this type of scheme. Certainly, by most people’s standards I have been successful. I see the approach I took as something that enabled me to grow and not end up disillusioned and doing something I would have hated. By the age of twenty-seven I was managing big teams of people, in big businesses with ten years of working experience to call upon and a great qualification. Before I was fifty, I was able to be part of selling a multi-million-dollar business to a Silicon Valley unicorn. I may have still done that had I stayed on the traditional route that was planned out for me, many have. But for me the mixture of “learning while earning” as I used to call it helped me make a difference.
What I did was, to some degree, a self-managed apprenticeship. If you are thinking of taking on an apprenticeship this year, I would say do it. In a few years it would be wonderful to be speaking to a lot more potential entrepreneurs who followed that route and want me to invest in them, and their ideas.