Employer Skills Survey 2024 - Scotland

Apprenticeships

This chapter explores the key characteristics of apprenticeships in Scotland and future plans for offering apprenticeships. For context, the 2024 survey found that around one in six (16%) Scottish employers offered apprenticeships and 10% currently had apprentices; both results are the same as in 2022.

When discussing apprenticeships in this chapter, this refers to apprenticeships that follow a formal framework or standard, and lead to a nationally recognised qualification.

Key characteristics of current apprenticeship offering

Among Scottish employers who offered apprenticeships, the majority (70%) offered modern apprenticeships. Around one in six offered graduate apprenticeships (16%) and foundation apprenticeships (15%). Around four in five (82%) offered any of these apprenticeship types.

A minority of apprenticeship employers (10%) offered both modern and foundation apprenticeships, 9% offered both modern and graduate apprenticeships, while 4% offered both foundation and graduate apprenticeships. Just 3% of employers offered all three apprenticeship types.

The majority of apprenticeship employers (92%) offered apprenticeships to young people under the age of 25. Just under half of apprenticeship employers (47%) exclusively offered them to young people. The same proportion (47%) offered apprenticeships to those aged 25 and above, with just 1% offering them to this age group exclusively.

This is fairly consistent with 2022 findings, as shown in Table 10.

Employers were most likely to offer apprenticeships to those under 25.

Table 10: Age groups to whom apprenticeships were offered, 2022 compared to 2024

Base: All sites who have/offer apprenticeships in Scotland (2022: 293; 2024: 297).

A larger proportion of employers recruited people to do apprenticeships (90% of those offering them) than offered them to existing employees (49%), and the gap in these results had widened since 2022 (when 87% offered to new recruits and 52% to existing employees). The proportion that offered apprenticeships to existing employees has continued to decline from the corresponding figure of 62% in the 2021 Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey. Only 7% of apprenticeship employers solely offered apprenticeships to existing employees in 2024. This is shown in Table 11.

Employers were more likely to offer apprenticeships to new recruits than to existing staff.

Table 11: Employment groups to whom apprenticeships were offered, 2024 compared to 2022

Base: All sites who have/offer apprenticeships in Scotland (2022: 293; 2024: 297)

Nearly three quarters (74%) of employers who offer apprenticeships said they had been doing so for more than 3 years, while nearly one in five (18%) had introduced them within the last 3 years.

Future apprenticeship plans

A quarter (25%) of employers plan to either continue or start offering apprenticeships in the future. This is lower than in 2022 (31%), and continues a downward from 2021, when 40% planned to offer apprenticeships in future.

This reduction is mainly influenced by a large reduction in the proportion of non-apprenticeship employers who are planning to start offering apprenticeships (12%, compared with 20% in 2022 and 28% in 2021). The proportion of apprenticeship employers planning to continue offering remained similar (92% vs. 89% in 2022). The likelihood of employers planning to offer apprenticeships in future increased with size, ranging from 16% of sites with 2 to 4 employees to 62% of employers with 100 or more employees. Though this pattern has been consistent in previous waves, the difference of 46 percentage points between the lower and upper size bands is a larger disparity than in 2022 (37 percentage points).

The proportion of employers planning to offer apprenticeships in the future increased by site size, with larger employers more likely to offer them.

Figure 25: Proportion of employers planning to offer apprenticeships in the future by site size in 2024

Base: All sites in Scotland (Module A) (1,327)

Nearly two fifths of all employers operating in Construction (39%) and Education (39%) planned to offer apprenticeships in the future, which was the highest among all sectors.

Among employers who were not currently offering apprenticeships but planned to start, the majority of these employers saw them as a way of acquiring talent (79%), including half (50%) who saw them as a good way to get skilled staff and 29% who saw them as a way to ensure young people continue to enter their industry or organisation. Around one in six employers hoped to use them to nurture talent (16%), including 7% who hoped to use them to upskill current staff, while 14% described more altruistic motivations around offering young people a chance at employment.