Yes — and needing none is the point of the route. Degree apprenticeships exist to train people who have not done the job before, and the overwhelming majority recruit school leavers with nothing professional on their CV. What employers assess instead is potential, motivation and how you handle their selection process.
Why the worry is misplaced
An apprenticeship is a training contract. The employer is funding a degree and several years of development precisely because they are recruiting for potential rather than for current ability. A programme that required relevant experience would be recruiting people who no longer need it.
This shows up in the entry requirements: they specify grades, occasionally specific subjects, and essentially never professional experience. Where an advert does ask for experience, check the level — it is usually a Level 4 or 5 route aimed at people already in work, or an explicit career-changer programme.
What they assess instead
- Online assessments. Situational judgement, numerical and logical reasoning. Nothing to do with experience, and substantially improvable with practice.
- Motivation. Why this occupation, why this employer, why the apprenticeship route rather than university. The single weakest part of most applications, and entirely within your control.
- Competency examples. A time you worked in a team, handled a setback, managed conflicting demands. The setting can be anything; the structure is what is being marked.
- Assessment centre performance. Group exercise, presentation, interview. This is where offers are actually decided, and it rewards preparation rather than CV length.
What counts as an example when you have no job
Applicants routinely discard the material they actually have because it does not look professional enough. Almost all of this works:
- Part-time or casual work — retail, hospitality, tutoring, a paper round, helping in a family business.
- School projects with an outcome — an EPQ, a group coursework project, a science investigation that went wrong and had to be salvaged.
- Sport and societies — captaincy, organising fixtures, being the person who makes something happen every week.
- Volunteering — including informal caring, helping at a club, or community work.
- Personal projects — a mod, a website, a small business, a YouTube channel, teaching yourself something and finishing it.
- Responsibilities at home — caring for a family member, translating for parents, holding a household together while working. These are strong examples and applicants almost never use them.
The test is not whether it sounds impressive. It is whether you can tell it as a structured story: the situation, what you specifically did, and what happened as a result.
What actually helps more than experience
- Practising the online tests. The highest-return hour you can spend. Most rejections happen at this stage, before anyone reads a word you wrote.
- Knowing something specific about the employer. Not the mission statement — a project, a product, a recent piece of news you can say something about. This separates applications more reliably than any CV line.
- Having four or five competency stories ready in a consistent structure, rehearsed enough to tell cleanly under pressure.
- Applying to more programmes. Given how competitive these have become, volume and breadth outperform CV polish. See how many to apply to.
- Applying early in the cycle, before rolling recruitment fills the cohorts.
If you can get work experience, take it
None of the above means experience is worthless. It gives you better material, demonstrates genuine interest, and occasionally leads directly to an offer — several apprentices report getting theirs at a company where they had done work experience. If an opportunity is available, take it.
But it is an advantage, not a requirement, and the absence of it is not what is standing between you and an offer. Preparation for the assessment process almost certainly is.
Next: what grades you need, or the full how to get a degree apprenticeship guide.