D&C Engineers has offered apprenticeships for over 50 years, and we would not be the business we are today without the apprentices that we have hired.
In fact, Bryn Dixon who has worked at D&C for 47 years, started as an apprentice and worked his way up to a senior director, playing a major part in the running of the business.
Apprenticeships have been around for centuries and flourished during the industrial revolution, before being formalised in the 1960s. Providing people with training and experience on the job and being paid – in real-life situations, whilst providing businesses with an additional workforce.
However, apprenticeships were seemingly under threat for some time with the increasing numbers of school leavers continuing their classroom education by going on to study at university. As the number of students doing a degree steadily rose in the 1990s and 2000s, apprenticeships took a bit of a back seat in terms of first career steps, however with soaring tutorial fees and graduates leaving university with upwards of £45,000 of debt, many students, and their parents, are looking at apprenticeships as the perfect next step in their vocations.
Often when people think of apprenticeships, they think of younger people working for little pay or reward, but this cannot be further from the truth. Now, with nearly 350,000 people going on to take apprenticeships this year, they are well-paid as they learn also getting valuable on-the-tools training that they could not get in a classroom.
Anyone over the age of 16 can become an apprentice, so it’s ideal for those who want to retrain in a new field but cannot afford not to earn whilst they train. In fact, more than 47% of this year’s apprentices are aged over 25 years.
Another challenge the UK is facing is the ever-broadening skills gap, this is where apprenticeships really come into their own. With an ageing workforce and the risk of skills being lost as experienced workers retire, apprentices can train alongside mentors who can train them in their specialism in real-time, on the job, all whilst being paid.
We’re increasingly seeing the training and education come full circle, with many steering away from expensive degrees that often leave graduates with no transferable skills in the workplace, and instead focusing on on-the-job training, where they learn applicable skills whilst being paid as they learn.
We’re always on the lookout for talented, enthusiastic people who want to learn a trade and work their way up in a business. In fact, we have many apprentices and former apprentices working here and in the next 12 months we’re looking to hire more.
Some of D&C’s younger generation of apprentices and trainees with senior team members Bryn Dixon, Pete Cobb and MD Geoff Chatterley
