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Inspiration Blog for Aspiring Apprentices

Fighting my mind and finding my future - My apprenticeship journey

Hi I’m Holly, a Chartered Management Apprentice at DS Smith. I joined the SMI team from finishing my A-levels and couldn’t be happier to have fallen into this role. However, it was not a plain sailing journey to get here. Like many others, my high school years where clouded by COVID and during this time my mental health took a turn. This led to me being hospitalised with an eating disorder which p

February 7 Read more

From Rejection to Opportunity: My Journey into Engineering and Degree Apprenticeships

At 17, I thought I had my future mapped out. I knew I wanted a career that was impactful, creative and challenging. Engineering was the perfect answer… but I also knew university wasn’t the only way to get there. When I discovered degree apprenticeships, the idea immediately clicked: earning while learning, gaining real industry experience, and graduating without student debt. It felt like th

February 3 Read more

Life Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone: Choosing a Degree Apprenticeship Over the ‘Safe’ Route

The version of you who is still in school, college, uni, or between things right now might not see it yet, but your “different” route into work can become your biggest advantage. This is the story of how starting a small business at 13 accidentally kick-started a career in sales and marketing - and why betting on a degree apprenticeship, instead of the traditional university route everyone talks a

January 27 Read more

Identity, Inclusion, and Impact: My Apprenticeship Journey

Hey, my name’s Zach and I’m a Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketing Apprentice at Skills and Education Group. At school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, other than the fact that I liked drama, so I planned to go down a theatrical route. When I attended sixth form, I couldn’t take drama, so I had to choose something else. I chose quite creative A levels, photography and art, two subjects

January 20 Read more

How an Injury Changed My Future | My Journey to An Engineering Degree Apprenticeship

For most of my teenage years, my life revolved around balance: not the kind you plan, but the kind you learn through repetition.  During my GCSEs, I was balancing academy training with Harlequins alongside schoolwork. My weeks were structured: wake up, go to school, get home early, drive from Wembley to Surrey with my dad for 3hrs of training and find time to revise wherever I could

January 13 Read more

The Future I Didn’t See Coming

Apprenticeships were never a path I imagined for myself. They weren’t discussed at school, no one in my family or friendship circle had completed one, and I hadn’t even heard of anyone on an apprenticeship in my tight-knit community. There was simply no information available. Instead, I grew up hearing the stigma: apprenticeships were for those who “didn’t get into university,” “weren’t clever eno

January 6 Read more

From Motorsport Dreams to Manufacturing Reality: Why I Chose an Apprenticeship Over University

If you had told me two years ago that I’d be doing an apprenticeship instead of going to university, I would have laughed. I never imagined myself doing an apprenticeship. For most of my school life, university was the only option I considered. It was what teachers encouraged, what friends expected, and what I believed was the key to success. When I told my friends I was going to do an apprentices

December 30, 2025 Read more

Resilience Through Apprenticeship: How to Turn Struggles into Strength

For most of my life, I was told I had “so much potential”. I grew up in an all-girls grammar school where expectations were high, and success followed a very specific path. From the outside, it seemed like I had every opportunity, but in reality, I struggled to fit into a system that didn’t work for how I learned. School was difficult for me from an early age. Sitting still, concentrating, and tra

December 23, 2025 Read more

From Being Forced Out of University to a FTSE 100 Apprenticeship

At the start of Year 13, apprenticeships were not something I took seriously. A good friend mentioned them to me, but I dismissed the idea almost immediately. I saw them as the “easy route”, falling into the common narrative that apprenticeships were for people who were not academic enough for university. I also had a teacher tell me that “upper middle class” students go to top universities, not a

December 16, 2025 Read more

Why Not You? My journey from uncertainty to Deloitte

Going to university was my dream! My parents never attended university, and I had never known anyone who had. Like many others, I was told that university was the golden ticket to success. It felt like life was just a matter of ticking oﬀ each stage. First came the GCSEs, which hit me like a punch in the gut when COVID-19 struck, but we got through it. Then came the A Levels, and I had no idea jus

December 9, 2025 Read more

From Sceptic to Ambassador: How an Apprenticeship Changed Everything

If you had told me two years ago that I’d become an ambassador for apprenticeships, I would not have believed you. Back then, I saw apprenticeships as a fallback - something you applied to “just in case.” Today, I couldn’t be prouder to say I was completely wrong.   Chasing the “Traditional” Path For as long as I can remember, I assumed my future lay in STEM. I loved maths and problem-solving

December 2, 2025 Read more

Confidence in yourself is key

I am a seventeen-year-old with a vibrant passion for finance and accounting. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by managing money, making strategic decisions, and understanding how businesses grow. I regularly track my weekly allowance, carefully analysing ways to save more and invest wisely for the future. This passion is rooted in my ambition to run my own company one day and to become a fi

November 25, 2025 Read more

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink!

The world is undeniably changing for better or worse. The attractiveness of “easy money” or income through methods such as drop shipping now have oversaturated markets and are certainly not as easy as what the social media creators make it out to be. Ultimately its luck. The same way people capitalised on Bitcoin when it was new and emerging, it’s simply a matter of being in the right place and th

November 18, 2025 Read more

How i managed to channel my A Level failure into success!

Receiving my first degree apprenticeship offer wasn’t easy, but what was even harder was dealing with the failure that came when I didn’t achieve the A Level results I needed. Watching the future I had crafted for myself slip away was devastating. Degree Apprenticeships weren’t always on my radar, initially I was under the assumption that I would do what everyone else did. Go to university, study

November 11, 2025 Read more

The Next Big Decision

Growing up, I was surrounded by people who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do in life. They had a clear vision of their future, while I was still trying to figure out mine. Some knew from a young age that they wanted to go into medicine, law or engineering, I, on the other hand, didn’t have that same certainty. There were so many options, yet I didn’t fully understand them, which left m

November 4, 2025 Read more