At Asda we are always looking for the very best talent to help us provide great products and a great service for our millions of loyal customers who shop with us every week.
One way we ensure we have brilliant colleagues is through apprenticeships. A lot of people associate apprenticeships with young people and new employment, but we are proud of the way we’re been using apprenticeships to help develop our colleagues’ skills. Over the past 7 years, we’ve been able to support the development of more than 13,000 colleagues –which would equate to almost 10% of our current workforce – through our wide variety of apprenticeships.
We believe helping so many colleagues involved across a variety of programmes was a huge factor in us being ranked 65th in the Government’s recently announced Top 100 Apprenticeship Employer Awards. The rankings were developed by the National Apprenticeship Service in partnership with student and graduate research company, High Fliers Research, to celebrate the most outstanding apprenticeship employers.
Employers were marked on their overall commitment to employing apprentices, their creation of new apprenticeships, the diversity of their new apprentices, and the progression of their apprentices onto further apprenticeships and continuing employment.
Opportunities are plenty all across the business from retail to some of our higher level and degree apprenticeship programmes include Data Science, Food Science, Digital Technology Solutions and Retail Degree. We have 38 different programmes ranging from level 2 to level 7 to appeal to all stages of someone’s learning and development needs.
Asda providing such a variety of apprenticeships and having the willingness from colleagues to learn and improve is brilliant not only for their personal development, but it also ensures we, as a company, keep up with the changes we see in retail and continue to offer a great service to our customers.
At the moment we have 1336 colleagues enrolled on an apprenticeship and it is open to all colleagues to apply. We have such a diverse workforce and it has been great to see such enthusiasm from our female colleagues. Our current participation rate in programmes is at 52%, while there is 54% female representation of higher level programmes which are levels 5, 6 and 7. Age is certainly no barrier either, with our oldest apprentice aged 69!
We will continue to work hard to create apprenticeship and learning opportunities for our colleagues, so that they can continue to develop and do the very best for our customers.
