Apprenticeship opportunities at Ferrari and Amazon

Ferrari has announced that all twelve of the UK’s official Ferrari Dealers will be holding an “Open Day” at their aftersales facilities to showcase Apprenticeships opportunities. Each Dealer will be inviting students from selected local schools to visit the workshop and learn about Ferrari technology and potential job opportunities. Candidates will need at least 5 GCSEs. The following roles are available: 

Service Technician – 3 year Apprenticeship

Service Adviser – 2 year Apprenticeship
Parts Adviser – 2 year Apprenticeship.

Amazon has announced plans to create over 1,000 Apprenticeships over the next two years. Nine different programmes, lasting between 13 months and four years will be on offer, ranging from IT, safety and HR through to software engineering, robotics, leadership and technology. Over 90 new Amazon Bachelors and Masters degree-level Apprentices will also be available, focused on software development engineering, senior leadership and automation.

Post graduate salaries

You can use two websites (linked on the left hand side of this page) to find out potential post-graduate salaries for specific courses at particular institutions:

WHICH? University

• Use the Find a Course function – search by course and university
• Click on course information for one of the courses that comes up
• Click on – 'After graduation'
• First you can see the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education salary data, 6 months after graduation.
• Then scroll down to see mean salaries 1,3 and 5 years after graduation which comes from the Longitudinal Education Outcomes data-set. Only the mean is included, lower and upper quartiles aren’t.

Unistats:

• Search for course by subject and university
• Click on the relevant course that you are interested in
• Click on 'Employment and accreditation'.

You are what you see ...

Research undertaken by Reed.co.uk amongst 18-34yr olds found that 1 in 4 admitted that TV has influenced their career choices. The Apprentice was the top TV programme to influence careers, followed by Dragons’ Den, and then CSI and Law & Order. Love Island was seen as helping to inspire careers in fitness and sales thanks to an onscreen gym ...

Analysis of the benefits of a Degree

Analysis of data from 2015-16 has revealed some startling facts about the cost-benefits of going to university:

• 18-25% of undergraduates were studying for degrees which fail to deliver a lifetime-earnings premium that justifies the average student debt, from tuition fees and maintenance loans, of £50,000.
• 40% of undergraduates were enrolled in courses that led to median earnings below the student-loan repayment threshold of £25,000, after five years.
• 10% were enrolled in courses with median earnings below £25,000 ten years after graduation - representing 134,000 students every year who won't be paying back anything ten years after graduating yet who will have accumulated significant interest.
• 20% would be no better off five years after graduating than if they had chosen to take a non-university route, such as an Apprenticeship.

It could be argued that higher education and the "university experience" are a reward in themselves, beyond income, but ...

FBI tactics to address essay cheating

Now software is being developed using ‘forensic linguistics’, which analyses the composition of a document including vocabulary, punctuation and format. It is a technique used by the FBI to create profiles of criminal suspects. At the moment it is not illegal to set up a company writing essays, dissertations or other assignments for students. The companies simply post a disclaimer telling students their products are intended for reference or a guide. Their marketing tactics, emailing and messaging students directly, indicate just how lucrative the business is. As well as widespread use of sponsorship of young "vloggers" and other social influencers, some are also going on to city centre campuses with leaflets that imply they are from student support services. [source:GTAssociates]

Graduate earnings

With more and more concerns being reported in the media that some graduate career pathways may not result in incomes which repay the costs of the degree course, the i newspaper has recently published a table of earnings by degrees:

Further evidence of the increase in unconditional offers

A report from UCAS shows that 34% of 18yr olds applying for university places in England, Wales and Northern Ireland this year received some form of unconditional offer, with such offers rising from 3,000 in 2013 to 68,000 and reached 87,500 when combined with offers that became unconditional when a student made the institution their firm choice. The analysis also showed that the majority of sixth form applicants missed their predicted A-level grades, regardless of the type of offer held. Applicants with offers conditional on achieving specific grades missed their targets by two grades or more in 56% of cases, compared with 67% for students with unconditional offers.