We came across a candidate recently, a part-qualified Certified Accountant (ACCA) whose employer was funding their training costs with a well-known training provider – why? The costs of training an accountancy professional whether that’s ACA or ACCA is estimated to be over £25,000 per student over the three year training period which isn’t cheap and could prove prohibitive to some accountancy practices taking on trainees.
Level 7 apprenticeships, which have now been around for a year or two contain a significant benefit for small business employers which are defined as those with wage costs of less than £3m pa (lots of accountancy practices fall in this bracket I suspect) and that is the cost of training is covered by the government or well 95% of it is anyway. This means that the average costs of training an accountancy professional reduce to £1,250 a massive saving of £23,750 per student. So I ask again – employers are you missing a trick?!