Will King

"Our apprentices are excited about learning and come in to work well motivated."

We had two existing apprentices, one working within our tooling team and one within our engineering projects team; both were coming to the end of their Engineering HNC and both expressed an interest in progressing their education further. So we had a look at programmes available in the area and the Manufacturing Engineer Degree Apprenticeship course from Teesside University sounded like it fit the requirements of both apprentices to continue their progression in their respective career paths.

The world of engineering moves so quickly and we are aware that if organisations become complacent then they can find themselves falling behind competitors. Our hope for our apprentices will be that they learn new tools and techniques that will help Arlington continue to progress and make us more efficient and competitive in the future.

Although early days, we have positive reactions from both our apprentices. They are excited about learning and come in to work well motivated, confident and bring a lot of new ideas about how to get things done.

While the 20% off the job training was initially a bit of a concern for some of our managers when we first looked at the details of the programme, the time dedicated to the course and their learning is an investment in their development and their future and as a result we have found our apprentices capabilities continually improving and there is a great payback to the company through this.

We would definitely look to put other staff through an apprenticeship in the future, both for new and existing employees. We are starting to look at our recruitment and training plans for next year and further apprenticeships are something that we will definitely be looking at as a part of this.