As Apprenticeship week passes in Wales, it was a nice coincidence that at our weekly team meeting we recognised the achievements of our very own Georgia Davies, who in 4 weeks time will complete her Level 2 Apprenticeship in Business Administration. At our meeting we celebrated Georgia’s journey and looked towards the next level of qualification to assist Georgia in developing our back office function; allowing our Social Enterprise to grow and unlock the potential of more children each week.
Something that also struck us, is where our business and more importantly the opportunities we provide sit in the grand scheme of the current drive within Apprenticeships; how can we contribute?
When we employed Georgia; we were a company of 3 FTE employee’s with one year of operating at our home in Dare Valley Park; however, despite such youth, we saw the benefits and potential of employing a young and local individual who wanted to develop a career in “running an office”. For us, the opportunity of someone learning and developing their administration skills whilst on the job, and also developing our office function was very appealing. We knew that whilst we could have done with employing someone who had an experience of creating systems and procedures for running an office, financially as start-up Micro-Business, we simply couldn’t do that. Taking on an Apprenticeship wasn’t in the original plans, but we wanted to take the jump and invest in Georgia and the long term.
Hard at work and hiding from the camera.
So as we stand, we are now a company of 7 FTE employees, and of them we have:
1 Apprentice
2. Jobs Growth Wales Recruit
3. Young Trainee Recruit
All of these team members are under 25, and live within 6 miles of Aberdare. One of our business commitments is to develop and train local and young talent where possible.
Now, whilst we are no GE or Ford’s; we feel like we are making a contribution to providing accessible opportunities for long-term and purposeful employment for local young people. Whilst the 100+ Apprenticeships that these large companies provide and hugely valuable and needed; we feel that pound-for-pound, many companies like ours (based in the Valleys looking for local young talent to nurture and grow) are equally as valuable.
We can only commend the apprenticeship scheme and our partner Educ8 whose staff in the back office and assessors have been a great training provider.