Variohm Looking for Apprentices through the Engineering Trust

We want to promote apprenticeships and attract the best candidates to join our team.  Some of the positions we are looking to fill are Apprenticeships.

We will be hiring apprentices through the Engineering Trust.

How you can Benefit from the Engineering Trust

Are you planning on further study in the near future? Have you considered doing an apprenticeship? The Engineering Trust works with many companies, just like Variohm, who offer apprenticeship programmes.

Most people applying for apprentices know that one of the benefits of choosing an apprenticeship over full time university or college is the lack of debt. Here at Variohm, we pay for your qualification as well as paying a full time wage. So when you have graduated you don’t have the average £44,000 debt dragging you down. However this is just one of the many advantages and we would like to focus on the others.

1.       Experience

Working within the field of the qualification you are completing is important and will help you to pass the course. The course is studied part-time which means that you are more likely to learn a module and practically have time to work on it before moving on to your next module. The experience gained through work will aid your study and give you a better understanding of engineering as a whole and we hope that you will stay with us and progress to different areas within the company where appropriate.

Emma Band our Production Manager says “We are hoping that by ‘growing’ our own engineers they may end up as part of our Technical Sales Team or as part of our Engineering Team as we are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit for these positions.”

2.       Responsibility

Part of the apprenticeship involves working full time. This can come as a shock for ex-students who have recently been studying “full-time” at university for three years. An apprenticeship gives you the life experience of holding down a full time job whilst training you to be as good at that job as you can be.

3.       Pension and Healthcare Scheme

As part of the full-time employment, our apprentices are also included in our pension and health care scheme. This is something that you wouldn’t get at university.

4.       Transferable qualifications

The qualifications earned whilst working at Variohm are all industry and nationally recognised which means if you choose to move on from Variohm, you take your qualification with you to use in your next job.

5.       Guaranteed job

Unlike graduating from university, when you complete your apprenticeship qualification Variohm can guarantee a full time job still for you. So you have no debt and a guaranteed job.

We currently have three apprentices working in our engineering department. Nathan and Jordan have been working with us since September 2014 and are part way through year 2 of their Diploma. Gareth joined the team in September 2015 and is working through his first year.

Variohm Value Apprenticeships.

You may not know that Roy Moffatt, our Managing Director, Richard Kelley, our Engineering Manager and Emma Band our Production Manager all completed apprenticeships at a similar age to our current apprentices, this is one of the reasons we are passionate about the apprentice scheme and want to offer young people to same opportunity some of our more experienced employees have made a success from. 

All of our apprentices have joined us excited to learn and eager to take on new challenges.  We have offered them as much experience as we can, they have moved into the engineering department and been able to spend some time working with CAD and they have been offered some time in accounts which will give them a deeper understanding of more functions within the business. By the end of their qualification they will have spent time in every department giving them the experience of knowing how a business functions as a whole.

Cathy, our Operation director looks after the apprentice programme here at Variohm, she says “Apprenticeships are an effective way of developing quality staff who will grow with the business.”

Nathan and Jordan can tell you how much they are enjoying their time with Variohm, we released a video which is featured below

Women in Engineering

There are 11 people in our production/ engineering team 3 of which are women. Their job titles are Production manager, production supervisor and Production Technician. Two of these positions are of high responsibility.  It is important that women are encouraged to work as part of engineering and that they know it is not all heavy lifting etc

Emma Band our Production Manager says “Unfortunately women still need encouragement to take up engineering positions it still not a natural career choice for them. Engineering is a description for a very wide and varied industry and I think it is still perceived that to be an engineer you have to be involved in heavy and dirty work, this is just not the case as many job titles that contain the word engineer are now desk based due to the use of computers.”

New Apprentices for Variohm

We will be looking to take on two more apprentices in September 2016 to study the Extended Diploma Level 3 in Engineering Manufacture. We are doing this because of the success we have had in the past and because of the rate of growth in our production department. Anyone who is interested in applying can get in touch with the Engineering Trust and they will do the leg work. The link to their website is at the bottom of the page.

A lot of schools, colleges and parents will be encouraging their students and young adults to go to university for further study. People tend to brush apprenticeships to one side and we want to stop this from happening!

We were booked into an Apprentice Open Evening through the Engineering Trust, unfortunately this event had to be cancelled due to lack of interest – this just makes us want to shout about Apprenticeships even more. If you have any questions or want more information contact The Engineering Trust.