This is according to the co-founder of Rethink Group, who left the company to set up a training academy to train previously undiscovered talent.

After around 30 years working in the recruitment industry, Andy Lord left Rethink, and with his business partner David Muir set up Code Nation in September 2017. Lord is Code Nation’s CEO.

Headquartered in Manchester, Code Nation provides training in coding and in cyber skills, with many students either unemployed and in receipt of benefits, or those who have no experience working in the sector. Broadly based on the US boot camp model of short, sharp and intense courses, much of Code Nation’s income comes from the Apprenticeship Levy.  

Lord told Recruiter: “Around 80% of students in our classrooms are filled by apprentices, who are being paid an average of around £23k a year by employers.” He said his ambition is to train “thousands of people”.

Lord suggested that apprenticeships could be the answer to one of the sector’s most serious problems, a lack of staff loyalty, caused by employers having to offer higher and higher salaries to attract staff. The danger is, Lord said, while this was “financially rewarding for the employee, for the business it is very hard to create loyalty in this market”.  

In turn, he warned the resulting escalating salary levels “will force more and more projects to be offshored and more and more [businesses] to think about taking people from Europe”.

By investing in people and providing them with the training they needed “to set them up for life, you are kind of hoping you are appealing to people’s sense of values so that when they get a call from a recruiter saying ‘I can get you a better job paying you more money’, they are going to think ‘I am going to have to sit this through for a while because I owe a little debt of gratitude to the employer that invested in me’. I think that is a wonderful thing for the industry. I think that is the game changer.”  

Lord said one outcome of setting up Code Nation was that he was “inadvertently creating a new talent pool” that will, in a year or two, have the skills needed to feed into the industry that he had spent most of his career in.

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