A careers programme for schools that'll engage and inspire students
Try a Trade gives teachers and career advisers everything they need to help inspire a new generation of young people about the incredible apprenticeship and career opportunities in trades like plumbing, electrics, and carpentry.
What is Try a Trade?
We’re helping school students in Years 10 and 11 discover more about careers in the trades, providing teachers and career advisers with a hub of resources and content to share as part of your careers programme or careers fairs, as well as first-hand access to people already working in trades.
Try a Trade, powered by Checkatrade, aims to help plug a national trade skills gap of almost ONE MILLION workers over the next decade, by connecting young people with a world of limitless possibilities in a trades career.
What to expect
A range of schools across the UK are using Try a Trade resources in their schools to excite and inspire young people about working in the trades. It offers:
- A hub of practical resources for careers advisors and teachers to share, aimed at giving young people unique insights about life in the trades, including presentations, hand-outs, videos, and posters.
- An engaging, ready-to-go, programme of activities that shares additional career and education pathways, helping young people understand the opportunities and earning potential of a trades career
- The chance to explore career possibilities, by connecting young people’s CV’s directly to trades employers.
Try a Trade aims to break down the barriers to accessing the trade industry, and open young people’s minds to the earning power and potential of life as a tradesperson.
Access free careers resources and guides
Everything you need to launch the Try a Trade programme in your school is available – for free – on our hub.
A range of free resources, activities, and engaging sessions are available – just register your details or log in, and you’ll instantly be able to access anything you might need.
We can also help connect young people with employers who are actively looking for their next trade apprentice, opening up real-world possibilities for your students.
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- Access to school resources to help showcase vocational trade careers
- We’ll equip young people with the skills and confidence to start their trade career journey
- We’ll share careers advice and support to both students and parents, helping them find trade job opportunities in their areas
- We’ll work with local training providers and trade SMEs to connect your students to real-world possibilities
If you’re a school, you can easily get in touch to find out more!
Wherever you’re based in the UK, start that journey now and you could bring your careers days to life in a new and exciting way.
It’s easy! Complete the registration form and you’ll be access all of the resources and assets to run Try a Trade in your School.
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Trades business or training provider??
You can inspire future generations of trades
- You can be a role model, inspiring a new generation of tradespeople
- You can directly influence and build new careers – inspiring others
- We’ll give you direct access to motivated, ambitious young people – the tradespeople of the future
If you’re an employer or training provider and want to inspire the next generation, we’d love to hear from you too. We’re always on the lookout for tradespeople and trades businesses that want to give back.
Many trades leaders were inspired by someone special in their own lives – and you could be that person for many more young people: The UK’s next generation of trades talent.
Simply complete the form and we’ll be in touch with all the details.
Note: Just to let you know (and as you may expect), as part of the scheme, once we’ve provided your contact details with your local school, they may then have some vetting checks they’ll need to run.
Guides and advice
How to write a CV for an apprenticeship
Essential apprenticeships information to know before applying
Apprenticeship training examples: What do apprentices learn?
Our Webinars
1: Introduction to the Try a Trade programme
Hear from colleagues at Checkatrade, in partnership with Amazing Apprenticeships, about the range of free and exciting resources you can access and the support available for your students in searching and applying for live trades apprenticeship vacancies.
2: Deep dive into About Apprenticeships
Hear from colleagues at Checkatrade, in partnership with Amazing Apprenticeships, about the range of free and exciting resources you can access and the support available for your students in searching and applying for live trades apprenticeship vacancies.
FAQ's
We are trying to be as inclusive as possible in what we do but it is quite early days for us. We are keen to try and develop our programmes with people with lived experience of varying disabilities and particularly with different types of groups, so we would welcome people reaching out to us to help us to develop the modules and co-create future modules so that they are much more inclusive.
We did have a SEND school participate in the pilot year, who did support and give feedback on their own experiences, but yes as much feedback as possible would be useful going forward.
Please email us at: info@aboutapprenticeships.com
The resources are intended for schools and career advisors. However, training providers can still sign up and use the resources if they wish to. We encourage training providers to register with us so that we can connect them with schools that are looking to arrange experiential sessions for their students to attend. To register with Try a Trade, click here.
There are two ways to engage with Try a Trade.
1) You can register on our Jobs board for free and advertise any work experience or apprenticeship opportunities you have available. To register, click here.
2) You can register your interest to support schools with experiential sessions. Schools will then be provided with your contact details so that they can reach out to you and arrange a school visit. This is a great opportunity for you to share more about your trade, business and the great prospects young people have in such a prosperous and growing sector! To register with Try a Trade, click here.
At Checkatrade, 84% of trade members said that they would like to take on an apprentice, but only 3% have done so. We’re told that the main barriers are the administration and bureaucracy related to the apprenticeship process and accessing the apprenticeship levy for funding. Small trade businesses are unlikely to have an administration or a Human Resources team to support them with the process.
Yes. We know from our Checkatrade platform and from our research that there is a huge demand for trades. We need an additional 1 million people to join the industry in the next 10 years to close the skills gap, so regardless of what trade you join, we are confident that you are going to have a great career in an industry that is full of prospects.
We know that the biggest gaps tend to be in plumber and electrician areas, with carpenters following closely behind. For those skilled trades we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people being needed not fives or tens. For more information, please read our Trade Skills Index report.
Additionally, if you have any questions about specific trades, we are happy to try to answer them separately. Please email us at: info@aboutapprenticeships.com
There is currently no time limit on how long the resources will be available for.
It is very much up to you how you wish to deliver the programme. You may choose to run it over the course of a few weeks, a couple of years, or you may decide that you want to be more strategic and align it with other parts of the curriculum.
Our suggestion would be to first visit the teacher’s guide as it contains guidance on how you may fit the programme into your lesson plans. Alternatively, running a small pilot might be a good approach. You can then learn from cadence of delivery works, understand the engagement, and see which areas are more suitable.
We’ve tried to structure the programme in a way that means you don’t have to deliver the whole programme in one go but ultimately you decide what works best for you and your students.
Absolutely.
Whichever works best for you. In the pilot year, we saw a real mixture of career leaders, career advisor teams, curriculum leaders and heads of years delivering the programme. It ultimately depends on what resource you have available and what works best for your establishment. There is no requirement that it must be a particular member of staff that delivers this programme. Plus, we know how busy you are and how much is asked of you, so hopefully, it is a big team of you who could do it together.
We’ll be running a webinar in January 2024 to share best practice of how different establishments are delivering the programme. It would be great to hear from you, if you would like to be involved please email us at: info@aboutapprenticeships.com
It’s their main board. The only difference is that we have set up a linking page so we can add our branding and make the transition smoother for you as you move from our website to theirs.
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