Technician Apprenticeship Standard

What is the standard and why was it developed?

The Education Technician Apprenticeship Standard (Level 3) was developed because we perceived a gap in the workable standard for technicians within the higher education (HE) sector.

The Standard was developed to provide entry level generic technical skills, relevant to all discipline areas and for both research and teaching technicians. This is designed to enable apprentices to identify and follow their preferred career path once they have completed the apprenticeship. This also provides an agile technical career path for technicians within HE.

The Standard, started by NTDC, overcame significant barriers to become approved.

Our working group includes HE Technical and HR colleagues across a range of universities, as well as colleagues from the NHS Clinical Simulation Based Education team.

Universities who have provided significant input include Birmingham, Reading, Bristol, Sheffield Hallam, Sheffield and Newcastle, however, we have also worked with a much wider network of higher education institutions (HEIs) along the way to develop and sense test along the way.

Our thanks to everyone who was involved in the development.

In part, the challenges occurred because we sought to develop a generic multidisciplinary standard rather than a single discipline standard and because of the challenges of meeting the Institute for Apprenticeships Training and Education (IfATE) requirements which they were also developing.

Therefore we are very pleased to be able to say that the Standard was approved on 14 January 2021.

What does the Standard include?

The apprenticeship is level 3, and provides a core set of generic technical duties and related knowledge skills and behaviours. In addition, there are also duties specific to HE and NHS. The typical duration is 18 months.

It can be used by teaching and research technicians across all discipline areas.

To see more information on the standard you can visit the Institute for Apprenticeships website.

Further information

We recommend that you also take a look at the presentation delivered by Caleb Wright at the HEaTED event with Keele University in 2021.

Caleb Wright's presentation (PDF, 509KB)

Read more about the L3 standard with CSR Group

CSR Scientific Training is the UK’s leading training provider for science and healthcare science apprenticeships. The CSR Scientific Training team worked with the trailblazer group to produce the L3 Education Technician Standard. 

If you have any further questions email us at ntdc@sheffield.ac.uk.

If you have any further questions email us at ntdc@sheffield.ac.uk.