I have really enjoyed tutoring on the JGA Group Level 3 Fundraiser apprenticeship for the last 18 months and it’s been wonderful to see our first apprentices passing their assessments and being awarded their certificates.
But I wish more people in the sector knew about this training as a recruitment, retention, upskilling and workforce development tool, so I’m grateful to the Chartered Institute of Fundraising for giving me this opportunity to say why I think apprenticeships are BRILLIANT!
This is the thing that fires me up more than anything else. We know that getting a first job in fundraising after school or university can be tough. Young people who have family networks or those who can afford a long spell of unpaid work have a big advantage over those without that privileged background. The opportunity to learn on the job and be paid a wage as you learn the skills you need for success is huge.
Within our cohort, we have an apprentice who has just transferred into a fundraising role from a service delivery role. She’s going to be a great fundraiser, and she’ll receive a grounding in theory as well as guided opportunities to put it into practice in her new role.
There are probably not many jobs where you are expected to pick things up as you go along to the extent that this seems to happen in fundraising! We have a couple of quite senior fundraisers on our course who are telling us that they are benefiting from the learning journey and are finding the additional reading recommendations helpful.
An apprenticeship can be a great staff development and retention offer. Staff are going to judge employers less on their fine words around valuing their staff, and more on what they do! An 18-month training and development package which adds value to the work of the team from day one is a powerful statement of intent from the employer.
We tend to specialise quite early in fundraising careers, so it’s great for our Trust fundraisers to be thinking about corporate donor motivations, or community fundraisers to be thinking about data segmentation, and so on. The strategy and planning tools taught on the course, as well as the module on influencing and creating a healthy fundraising culture, will be hugely valuable to fundraisers as they develop their careers.
Entry points to the profession, such as apprenticeships, put our career on the map for school advisors, career coaches and university job boards. So many of us ‘fell into fundraising’, but wouldn’t it be great if more of the best people made an active choice to join the profession?
The L3 Fundraiser apprenticeship costs £8,000, but this is funded via the Apprenticeship Levy, to which many charities (along with employers from all sectors) have contributed.
The commitment on the part of the charity is to employ an apprentice for a minimum period of 18 months (or 30 months if part-time), and to give them the time to study and apply their learning on the job, as well as supporting them to put their learning into practice. For a full-time apprentice, the time they need to be given for their apprenticeship equates to 20% of the working week, or one day. However, the work they are asked to produce for their portfolio is grounded in the work of the organisation and their day job, so you will see evidence of their development in their day-to-day work.
Both private and public sectors have recognised the advantage of this free training for their teams and I would personally hate for the voluntary sector to be left behind. Last year, £2.4bn was unused in the apprenticeship levy pot – let’s make sure charities are getting their share.
Please share this blog with colleagues and on your social channels if you agree! If you are interested in learning more about the apprenticeships, have a look at the JGA website and drop Laura Thurlow a line. Laura coordinates across all of the relevant standards and would be happy to have a chat.