Apprenticeships are not just for school leavers. We see many adult apprentices around College who have decided to retrain or upskill, with the apprenticeship route being the most appropriate for them. Could this be an option for you to develop your skills?

To mark National Apprenticeship Week, we've thought long and hard about some of the reasons we think apprenticeships are a brilliant option for people who want to learn new skills (or enhance existing ones) to help them progress in their careers.

This is a question that we're asked regularly when we're speaking with people about apprenticeships. Often that's because they have a view that a traditional academic education is more highly prized than a qualification with a technical and professional focus.

You might think so. Certainly when I was growing up, as the son of a former engineering apprentice, I had a very fixed definition of what an apprenticeship was and the kinds of jobs it could lead to.

Working in construction is certainly not easy. Long hours, extreme levels of manual labour and a necessity to maintain constant vigilance in order to ensure safety, are traits that your average office employee won’t have to tackle.

Apprenticeships are becoming increasingly important to the working world, with hundreds of thousands of people joining up to schemes every year. It’s hard to know which apprenticeships will stand you in the right stead for future career progression.