Setting your Early Careers Strategy with Omari Harry

‍Setting an Early Careers Strategy

Whether you are starting from scratch or making changes to an existing strategy, there is a lot to consider when planning how you will ensure your talent pipeline and skills needs are fit for the business.

Often, change isn’t made as it can be seen as a substantial task, and it would be easier to kick that proverbial can down the road for now.

The first thing to do is to reflect on your current system and discuss your future needs, this can be brought together with a good Training Needs Analysis.

Click here to Read the full Training Needs Analysis Article

I spoke to experience Early Careers professional Omari Harry to get his thoughts on how to set a robust early careers strategy.

Omari Harry is founder of Arthur Curtis Education, which for the last 2 years has been innovating the Early Careers End-to-End Management space on behalf of large businesses.

Omari sees Early Careers Management as simply a Project Management role. He goes on to break this down into 4 key parts:

• Analysis
• Strategy
• Implementation
• Quality

A lot of the work when setting and maintaining a robust Early Careers Strategy is at the beginning, where you are asking yourself some really important questions that will shape your processes. They will be something along the lines of

• What do we want to achieve and what impact do we want to see in the next 2-5 years?
• When do we want to achieve this and how will we deploy ROI to maximise impact?
• How are we going to achieve it and what do we need from delivery vs internal support?
• Who is going to benefit and how will those beneficiaries then benefit the operations or other?

Those key questions may take considerable thought, but the answers will help considerably in focusing your vision.

At this point you need an experienced manager to carry out your vision, someone like Omari who can take his experience and implement it with ease. Once the relevant programmes have been implemented, the ongoing management is largely quite simple, with relationship management and ongoing process reviews which can be done fairly efficiently with the right data and templated processes in place.

Case Study

The reason we asked Omari to contribute to this article is because he has innovated within this space in a way not seen before, so hopefully you can find some insight within his ideas.

In his experience working within the space, working extensively in the ‘front end’ strategic thinking area of the Apprenticeship industry, he came to realise there was an alternative way to manage skills, in his eyes.

So he created a service for employers who couldn’t justify a bespoke Early Careers team dedicated to managing and setting up the required processes. He would charge for the front loaded side (TNA, Strategy & Implementation) which requires technical expertise, and then find ways to efficiently manage the coordination delivered across a monthly service which might only be costed between 1 and 8 consulting days spread across a tailored monthly flat rate, therefore reducing the costs to the business in comparison to an FTE.

This idea was further reinforced with consistent feedback from cohort peers of managed learners who found they weren’t getting the support they needed and there was a real need for someone who could implement efficient processes. Omari found a way to offer a full-time service using project management tools to frontload the bulk of the heavy lifting templating processes such as learner reviews to create robust data which can be reported to the business through a 3^rd party such as: Power BI dashboards. This reduces the time a business needs to pay for and increases the number of businesses that can be supported from one source of input.

Arthur Curtis Education’s first customer was Ann Summers, a great brand to start with, proving there was a real need for this type of project management.

Due to Omari’s interventions Ann Summers there was a noticeable improvement:

• 43% of completers for their inaugural retail cohort achieved distinction.
• They progressed over 3 years from ad-hoc office apprenticeships with great culture but inexperienced management to a robust procurement process and clear strategy alignment. Internal confidence improved including knowledge of how to own administration and procurement processes and launched the first organised closed cohort for retail management with a focus on women in leadership.
• Now considering further innovation including levy gifting for their Environmental, Social & Governance strategy.

Omari continues to take his innovative approach to help SMEs become more comfortable with using the levy efficiently without the often-unjustified costs of a full-time headcount.

The end goal is to see a point of evolution where we can see more young people joining growing small and medium sized businesses.

Summary

Hopefully, this has given you some food for thought on designing or redesigning your early careers strategy.

If you want a list of the things you need to consider when setting up an early careers strategy, click the link below to find a handy list of items you need to think about:

• How much Levy is available?
• How much can be utilised vs gifted
• What is the risk level per department that can utilise apprenticeship training 
• Current number of apprentices on programmes based on ability to support and provide growth opportunities that provide a measurable return
• Anticipated number of apprentices required to deliver a measurable goal
• What skills gaps does the business have now and predicted in the future?
• Cost of filling these gaps in levy funding, will you have to top this up outside the levy?
• Available hiring managers and trainers/mentors in the business and are they willing to support?
• Support systems required to facilitate the learning and pastoral welfare of apprentices
• How will training providers be selected?
• What are the values we are looking to demonstrate by using apprenticeship training?

If you want to follow up with Omari, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or send an email. Check out the details below:

linkedin.com/in/omariharry or omari@arthurcurtis.com

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