Marks Sattin are a recruitment consultancy, one of whose major clients is KPMG. To combat the inertia that the new policy around university fees might engender, KPMG have launched a scheme that will enable school leavers to enter straight into their chosen industry. Essentially an apprenticeship scheme, the difference is that this is happening in the financial sector. And Marks Sattin's Dave Way is excited at the prospect.

"This is the first of its kind – and the first of the big four (financial institutions - the other three being PwC, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young) and I don't anticipate it being the last to take on school leavers, and putting them through university and actually subsiding them as they build up towards a qualification. This year 100 people will be on the scheme, with about 800 recruited from universities."

 

To some that might seem like a drop in the ocean, with such a significant number still being recruited through the traditional university system. But then again, you wouldn't expect them to overhaul their recruitment policy completely, nor should you. The scheme is merely trying to help pre-empt the potential skills gap, or should we say, opportunities gap.

"It's tying into the discontent within the student population in terms of the volume of fees that they're going to have to pay moving forward; this will be significantly subsidised for the lucky 100 or so 18 yr olds who go to do a BSc in accounting, and then undergo a further qualification to become fully trained accountants. It is a long commitment that a student will actually have to make but the returns are there to be seen; assuming that they've put the work and effort and activity over a period of time they're going to be better positioned than their peers coming out of university, guaranteed a job, have a qualification and they won't be lumbered with an insurmountable debt through years of working life.

Do you get a qualification at the end of it or as you go along, so you get trained on the job?

  

"It's twofold, the degree element will come in the form of BSc in accounting from Durham university, and the second part is actually gaining your chartered accounting qualification which is pretty much the top notch most well-respected accountancy qualification there is in the UK. The commitment is actually to go and work within the training scheme at KPMG on a full-time basis, so I don't think the option for a masters is there or even further than that so that might be a limiting factor for some students.

If this is the only scheme of its kind, do you think any of the other big firms will follow suit?

"The past few years have seen big firms like KPMG simply stop their graduate programmes and as such, they've been guilty as some other markets have of being short-staffed of newly qualified accountants, so I think they see this as a very shrewd way of ensuring there is a consistent intake of staff and also trying to get a degree of loyalty from their employees; there is a very high percentage of accountants that when qualifying will simply go and look for a job elsewhere in the industry, so actually getting them from the source and actually ensuring that they pay for their qualification and actually pay them while they're studying is quite a shrewd move.

 

I think other firms will see this as a really interesting option. The only caveat I do have is that it is a long commitment to actually make and bearing in mind your average school or college leaver is 18 yrs old, do they actually really know what they want to do for a career at that stage? To what extent there will be a dropout rate as the scheme rolls forward, KPMG might look at this as a trial for the first year or two in order to test the waters, as it were."

This calls into question the intrinsic value of the university system. Are there skills that universities can provide still? Is this scheme just one of many ways into employment rather than being 'the solution'?

"I still believe that the vast majority of students will see the benefits of student life, in the range of activities and flexibility that most courses actually allow and also the lifestyle element which committing to work is really going to limit, so I don't think it's going to be for everybody; but it will tick a lot of boxes for some people who are looking for that security and are scared about amassing student debt."