By Maureen Deary, FE Inspector, Consultant and Expert in Governance, Leadership and Quality, matrix Standard Practitioner
Digital platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven guidance tools, and self-service Employability portals are now prominent across the Further Education and Skills (FES), Higher Education (HE), and Apprenticeship sectors.
Such AI and digitally driven platforms and tools offer scale, efficiency, and consistency. and they are seemingly here to stay with increased power and presence.
However, a comprehensive body of evidence, including sector-specific studies, meta-analyses and national frameworks, is unequivocal: digital and AI tools can support, but they cannot replace the depth, nuance and developmental impact of sustained human relationships in education, learning and skills, or in the development of Employability and Apprenticeship provision.
Across our sectors, the professional relationship between learners and their practitioners, tutors, lecturers, skills coaches, mentors, assessors, careers advisers and workplace supervisors remains the most powerful determinant of attendance, retention and programme completion, personal development, including confidence, resilience and self-efficacy, career readiness, leading to appropriate pathways and long-term employability, safeguarding, health, well-being and early identification of risk and individual needs including neurodivergent and positive progression to sustained work and/or further training.
This article supports the recent, authoritative evidence demonstrating that human interaction is indispensable. It also outlines the risks of over-reliance on digital/AI-only models, risks and proposes potential recommendations for provider leaders, governance advisory boards and policy stakeholders.
The Background and Context
The FE and Skills sector is undergoing a rapid digital transformation through the advent of wide-ranging AI-powered learning systems, automated skills assessments, algorithmic CV builders, digital career platforms, and employer-matching tools entering our sector. While these tools offer value, they are often promoted in ways that imply human guidance can be reduced or replaced. This is not the case!
At the same time, apprenticeship withdrawal rates remain a national concern; disparities in digital literacy persist; and employers report increasing gaps in learners’ human skills of resilience, communication, relationship-building, and problem-solving, which are shaped through interpersonal interaction. New learners entering their programme of learning and skills development often do not demonstrate these skills because they rely more on automated, digital, and AI-generated tools in their education and social life.
The question is therefore not whether digital and AI tools should be used – they do have their place, but how to deploy them without diminishing the essential human dimensions of Employability support and Apprenticeship success.
Why Human Interaction Still Matters Most! Careers Guidance and Employability Support
There is robust, consistent evidence that one-to-one personal guidance improves a wide range of outcomes. The Careers & Enterprise Company’s Personal Guidance: What Works? Publication identifies ‘good evidence’, including RCTs, longitudinal studies, and meta-analyses, shows that structured one-to-one guidance with qualified practitioners leads to: improved personal effectiveness, self-awareness, self-esteem and confidence building, enhanced career readiness, decision-making, planning, motivation and preparedness and improved educational outcomes, including attendance, retention, achievement and positive progression into next steps.
The above occurs because of the depth, trust and responsiveness of human dialogue and the range of factors that digital systems cannot replicate. Careerpilot’s evaluation of its hybrid model further demonstrates that digital information tools are most effective when combined with human guidance, particularly for learners requiring individualised, tailored support to meet their specific needs.
Apprenticeship Engagement, Attendance, Retention, Achievement and Workplace Success
Evidence shows apprentices withdraw when they do not feel heard, barriers and issues to completing their apprenticeship are not identified early, or employers lack the capacity to provide pastoral support, and no trusted relationship exists with a practitioner. Digital systems do not pick up subtle changes in behaviour, emotional cues, or early signals of disengagement. This can all lead to a failure in learners’ ability to build their personal and interpersonal skills. Confidence, resilience, communication and self-efficacy are strengthened through the lived human interaction and experience, not just via automated interfaces, tools and technology. Digital and AI tools cannot identify safeguarding risks that may be embedded in behaviour, tone, relationships, family circumstances or emotional presentation and when working online using IT.
Human relationships are even more critical in apprenticeships, where learners must navigate both on-the-job and off-the-job training and their employer workplace contexts and job roles. Effective employer line manager mentoring, on-the-job coaching and support help to improve an apprentice’s chance of achievement and full completion of their apprenticeship.
TUC/Unionlearn’s research on apprenticeship mentoring found that employers introduced mentoring primarily to improve retention and completion, and that completion rates improved where mentoring was embedded. Mentors gave apprentices a trusted voice, enhancing their confidence and helping them address issues early.
The St Martin’s Group (2024) reinforces these findings, identifying employer/provider support as one of the strongest predictors of apprentice achievement and success. Apprentice withdrawals often correlate with insufficient relational support, not technical difficulty. Mentoring and coaching is found to improve long-term employability.
The Youth Futures Foundation’s network meta-analysis found that professional guidance, plus mentoring/coaching and life skills training, yields significant gains in psychosocial outcomes, including resilience, self-efficacy, problem-solving, and confidence-building. All of these capabilities underpin sustained employment and long-term career progression, outcomes of which AI systems cannot deliver independently.
Policy and Framework Requirements
Sector frameworks remain firmly anchored in human interaction, including the updated Gatsby Foundation Benchmarks (2024), which require one-to-one personal guidance delivered by Level 6 and above advisers. The Gatsby Benchmarks emphasise tailored support, inclusion and responsiveness, qualities that depend on human practitioner conversations with learners and their resulting judgements. The matrix Standard for Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) supports the human interaction approach of living and working in an inclusive, equal and equitable society where there is equality of opportunity for all. The Ofsted 2025 Inspection Toolkit looks for good practice as the expected standard in both IAG and Careers, Advice and guidance (CEIAG), to support learners’ learning journey and positive progression into a destination of their choice.
Guidance for Apprenticeship Providers (CEC, 2024)
The guidance recommends embedding careers guidance into everyday delivery and quality processes, emphasising human-led support alongside any digital tools. The frameworks mentioned in the above section are pretty clear: digital provision can be used as a complementary tool, not a substitute or replacement.
The Risks of Over-Reliance on AI and Digital-Only Models Are Exclusion and Inequality
Large numbers of learners lack confidence, access, or competence in using digital tools and applying technology. Digital-only models disproportionately disadvantage learners with SEND, needing additional learning support and those with neurodivergent needs, or who are facing socio-economic barriers to life and work. Adults returning to employment and or education, often with low prior achievement and lack of self-esteem, rely on human reassurance to build their confidence, resilience and develop the appropriate range of workplace knowledge, skills and behaviours. This helps an individual to better perform in their job role and also make an active contribution to their employer’s business and growth.
What Effective Provision Looks Like: A Blended Human-Digital Model
The evidence points decisively toward blended delivery. In this model, AI and digital tools support a scalable labour-market information approach, improve administrative efficiency and progress-tracking dashboards, and provide consistency in the use of resources, including bite-sized learning, reinforcement, and skills development. Human practitioners deliver professional judgement, pastoral support and mentoring, confidence-building and resilience, personalised guidance, safeguarding oversight, advocacy, accountability and challenge and relationship-based motivation. Digital systems can handle the ‘what’ of information. Human practitioners deliver the ‘why’, ‘so what’, and ‘what next.’
Recommendations for Providers, Governance Boards and Policymakers
Protect the time and capacity of skills coaches, tutors, advisers and mentors and ensure apprentice caseloads for staff are realistic and allow for sustained relationships.
Consider mandating Blended Models in Strategy and Quality Frameworks. Use digital tools to supplement, not replace, structured guidance and mentoring and embed personal guidance and mentoring into quality, retention, achievement, health, well-being and safeguarding processes.
Work on strengthening Employer Engagement and Support, ensuring that employers understand their critical co-responsibility for pastoral support.
Focus on building employer capability to provide effective workplace mentoring and early intervention.
Measure What Actually Matters
Include resilience, confidence, self-efficacy, workplace behaviours and how to measure a sense of belonging and engagement in soft skills, KPIs and performance reporting. These outcomes help to drive long-term learner success, yet are often neglected in digital systems.
Invest in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
Ensure that your practitioners are equipped through CPD to deliver high-quality mentoring.
Integrate AI tools appropriately, recognise and respond to early signs of disengagement and support diverse learners effectively.
Apply an Equity Lens to all digital strategy decisions and engage all of your workforce, learners and employees in making best-fit choices.
Conclusion
Digital and AI tools offer genuine advantages to the FES/HE and apprenticeship sectors. However, they cannot currently model or replicate the trust, empathy, judgement and responsive expertise that underpin learner success. The evidence is unequivocal that human interaction remains the most potent driver of retention, progression, resilience and long-term achievement in apprenticeships and employability provision.
AI and digital tools should be viewed as essential enhancers, not the primary source of information, nor substitutes, for the professional relationship at the heart of effective learning and work-based development. Providers and policymakers who get this balance right will deliver not only higher achievement and full programme completion rates, but also genuinely transformative positive outcomes for learners, employers, and local communities and meet regional/local workforce development and Employability priorities.
Supporting References
Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) (2018) Personal Guidance: What Works?. CEC. Available at: https://www.careersandenterprise.co.uk/media/xuzdfl2s/what-works-personal-guidance.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) (2020) Personal Guidance Fund Evaluation – Final Report. CEC. Available at: https://www.careersandenterprise.co.uk/media/ftbnck0i/1492_pgf-final-report.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
Careerpilot / University of Bath (2020) Evaluation of the Careerpilot Whole-School Approach. Available at: https://www.careerpilot.org.uk/assets/file/30ecb0d6-b361-4318-aafe-88f8cc7b9e51/cec-careerpilot-pathway-planner-final-report-june-2020.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
TUC / Unionlearn (2014) The Role of Mentoring in Supporting Apprenticeships. TUC. Available at: https://www.unionlearn.org.uk/sites/default/files/publication/TUC%20Mentoring%20Role%20Supporting%20Apprenticeships%20%25284%2529.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
The St Martin’s Group (2024) Enabling Better Outcomes: A Wider View of Apprenticeship Success. St Martin’s Group. Available at: https://stmartinsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Enabling-better-outcomes-a-wider-view-of-apprenticeship-success-2024.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
Youth Futures Foundation (2023) Evidence Summary: Six Youth Employment Interventions. Youth Futures Foundation. Available at: https://youthfuturesfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/evidence-summary-six-interventions-NMA.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
Gatsby Foundation (2024) Good Career Guidance: The Next Ten Years – Updated Benchmarks. Gatsby Foundation. Available at: https://www.gatsbybenchmarks.org.uk/app/uploads/2025/02/j0716-gatsby-summary-of-changes-colleges-final.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025).
Careers & Enterprise Company (2024) Effective Approaches to Careers Guidance for Apprentices. CEC. Available at: https://resources.careersandenterprise.co.uk/sites/default/files/2024-03/1849%20-%20Apprentice%20Guide%20v8.pdf (Accessed: 5 December 2025)