Civil Service Live Network: Civil Service Challenge

Barry Bullis, HM Revenue & Customs
Andrea Skelton, HM Revenue & Customs
Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Department for Work and Pensions
Rachel Onikosi, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Their Scores

Attendance at presentation: 22
Pledges to meet apprenticeships service: 9
Remaining budget: £49

For the four civil servants dispatched to Devon to complete their challenge, it was the personal touch that made the difference when drumming up enthusiasm for their seminar on apprentices. Richard Llewelyn-Davies, a team leader in the private pensions policy division of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), says that email shots to local businessmen using a mailing list provided by the Federation for Small Business (FSB), and an appearance on BBC Radio Devon, only had a limited impact.

“The people that came to the presentation and were interested in what we were doing were people we’d actually spoken with one-to-one,” Llewelyn-Davies says. “But obviously you can only speak to a relatively small number of people.”

The group still did well to build a sizable number of contacts in Plymouth’s business community ahead of its event, Llewelyn-Davies argues. From his own perspective, experience gained in his day job helped: he regularly networks with private pensions providers on behalf of his department, and so is used to establishing relationships with people in the business world.

“I didn’t know a lot about apprentices, but I’m quite used to going and talking to companies,” he says. One of the companies the Plymouth team encountered – the printer that produced their flyers for their event – had already employed an apprentice and was enthusiastic about attending an event to talk up the benefits of doing so.

Having that kind of positive personal testimony was crucial to the eventual success of the event, which persuaded one local company to employ two apprentices. “If you are running a small business and you feel you can talk to someone who is managing an apprenticeship programme you are far more likely to take on an apprentice than if it feels like a remote bureaucratic exercise,” says Llewelyn-Davies.

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