HOW SHA. HELPED REPOSITION AN APPRENTICESHIP OFFER
The University of Cumbria doesn’t just dabble in apprenticeships—they’re serious players. Ranked in the top 3% of apprenticeship providers by volume, they’re one of the leading universities delivering higher level and degree apprenticeships in the UK.
The numbers tell the story: a Qualification Achievement Rate of 81.3% in 2022/23, with 75% of apprentices securing a 2:1 or first-class award. Over 2,000 live learners sponsored by 340 employers across public, private, and not-for-profit organisations nationwide. Their ambition? Growing to 2,500 learners by 2025.
Following our successful student recruitment campaign for the university, we were appointed to develop the B2B brand for their Apprenticeship and Employer Skills offer. But this wasn’tgoing to be a typical B2B campaign.
Understanding What Employers Actually Want
The brief was clear from the start: the university wasn’t looking for hard sales tactics. They wanted to provide industry with skills solutions that were genuinely right for each organisation- to work with the right employers to enrol the right learners onto appropriate apprenticeships linked to trainee professional roles.
Employers weren’t looking to be sold to. They were looking to be informed. They needed practical facts to help make decisions about investing in their workforce through apprenticeships.
This required a fundamentally different approach to most B2B education marketing, which tends to shout about flexibility, value, and partnership without actually demonstrating expertise or understanding employer needs.
Creating Consistency Across Complexity
The challenge was significant: how do you maintain message consistency when speaking to diverse sectors about everything from nursing apprenticeships to digital marketing, engineering to social work?
The answer lay in creating a flexible framework – consistent messaging that audiences would recognise as distinctly University of Cumbria, but brought to life differently at every touchpoint depending on the specific apprenticeship and employer sector.
This consistency matters. When employers see the same core message expressed in contextually relevant ways across their journey – whether they’re researching online, attending events, or speaking with the UoC team – it builds recognition, trust, and authority. They begin to see the university not just as an apprenticeship provider, but as their apprenticeship partner.
Positioning as Skills Solutions, Not Sales
The creative approach positioned the university’s apprenticeships as what they genuinely are: tailored skills solutions designed to address specific workforce challenges. Not products to be pushed, but partnerships to be explored.
Every touchpoint reinforced the university’s credentials – the achievement rates, the employer base, the track record of delivering outstanding outcomes—while making it easy for employers to understand exactly how apprenticeships could work for their organisation.
The tone was consultative rather than promotional. Informative rather than persuasive. Confident rather than aggressive.
Because when you’re in the top 3% of providers with results like these, you don’t need to sell hard. You need to make it easy for the right employers to find you and understand how you can help them develop the skilled workforce they need.
Building for Growth
With ambitions to reach 2,500 learners and new programmes, the brand work we’ve created gives University of Cumbria a platform to scale their employer engagement while maintaining the consultative, solution-focused approach that sets them apart.
It’s a B2B campaign that actually understands what B2B means in the education sector: not shouting about yourself, but demonstrating that you understand the challenges employers face and have the expertise to help solve them.
SHA. is a strategic advertising agency, creating brand strategy, advertising, design for print and content for web and social. If you want to know more, get in touch with nigelh@sha-agency.com or visit our contacts page.
The opinions in this article are that of the author alone and in no way, reflect the opinions or viewpoint of the agency. Unless of course we happen to agree with those opinions completely, in which case they might, but otherwise they don’t.
