EMPLOYERS need to be taking on apprentices for the good of their own business, Sir Alan Sugar said yesterday.

The leading businessman, famous for television’s The Apprentice where he picks a young person to employ and train, was in Gateshead to encourage local businesses to invest in apprenticeships.

He also met three young apprentices from the region to gather their views on how they had benefited and what could be done to promote the system better.

And he hammered home the importance of taking on apprentices during the downturn.

Sir Alan said: “We are in difficult times, but I compare it to having a flood at home.

“You can either sit on the settee with your ankles under water and moan, or you can forget about the past and get out and do something about it.

“Businesses are in business and they need to invest in young people for the future.

“I want to dispel the myth that apprentices are good because they are cheap.

“They are not cheap. They may be cheap in the actual amount of money they are paid by the way of salary, but there are expenses because the employer needs to invest their time in growing these people up to become one of their mainstream employees.”

Sir Alan added: “They are important because it is the way that business ends up getting its core employees.

“Business has to invest in these people rather than taking the fasttrack route of fully qualified people.

They need their own homegrown staff.”

‘‘Young people are going to be the future of the company.’’ He also believed more needed to be done to encourage schools to promote apprenticeships and felt that young people who had completed schemes could become ambassadors for their value.

Sir Alan said: “Unfortunately, what happens in schools is they are given targets. Targets on the one hand are to be talked about at the end of the year: ‘this school got so many people through to A-levels, so many through to university’.

‘‘On the other hand, they could see the apprenticeship scheme as competition to erode those targets.

‘‘So I think you have to understand inside schools as to whether this apprenticeship stuff is getting support.”

He added that school staff should perhaps “themselves go on courses”

to ensure they were giving pupils the right advice.

Sir Alan said the three young apprentices he met yesterday were, “fantastic examples of what has been happening here in the North- East”.

One of them, Rachel Palmer, 20, from Middlesbrough, is doing a degree in mechanical engineering, part-time, funded by her employer Aker Solutions, in Stockton, which first took her on as an apprentice.

She believed Sir Alan was the perfect person to promote apprenticeships, adding: “I enjoyed it, I felt he was showing an interest in the views we were giving him.

“I think people already know him from The Apprentice programme, although he appears a little bit scary on there, and he understands the concept (of apprenticeships) and seems passionate about it.”

Sir Alan went on to meet about 370 employers from across the region alongside Hartlepool MP Iain Wright and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Lord Young.

It was one of a series of regional seminars to explore the business benefits of employing apprentices in the economic downturn.

The number of people completing apprenticeships in the North- East has risen by more than 100 per cent in the past four years.

For further information about Apprenticeships visit apprentice ships.org.uk or call 0800-0150-600.