TRAINING
Apprenticeships for the real world
Steven Campbell, director at Campbell West, discusses why apprenticeships are key to fi lling the skills gap and powering growth in the air conditioning and refrigeration industry.
T
hey say there’s no room for sentiment in business but try telling that to our sector’s company leaders during National Apprenticeship Week. That’s because this
annual apprenticeship awareness-raising campaign, which runs from Monday 5 to Sunday 11 February, serves as a timely reminder for many people across the air conditioning and refrigeration trade of where it all started. What’s more, National Apprenticeship Week should illustrate to us all why apprentices are key to the future and that much more needs to be done by our government to ensure they fi ll a worrying skills gap. I will return to what I think the government needs to do later but to put things into context, for my fellow Campbell West founder Daniel West and myself, the apprenticeship programme remains extremely close to our hearts. We started off as apprentice plumbers so we will always be indebted to our former mentors for helping us get a foot on the career ladder. But we also know that training apprentices is vital to the future growth and prosperity of specialist hvac companies like ours, because the only way we will fl ourish is by training the next generation of tradespeople. We are both fi rmly committed to training young people through the apprenticeship system because we know it works from personal experience.
Dan and I did well at school, academically. We both fl ew
through our GCSEs with As and Bs and as a result, found ourselves being directed towards a route to university. We both resisted that push towards higher education. It was uncanny that we made similar decisions, albeit a year apart and at diff erent schools and then met up through our apprenticeships, clicked and always seemed to be on the same wavelength.
But had it not been for apprenticeships, we’d have gone
down the university route and would have probably ended up in jobs unrelated to our degrees. For us, learning on the job was by far the best way. It was like being fast-tracked, professionally and personally. We had to do a year on site before we went to college but
by the time we got there we felt like we had really begun learning our trade. It’s fair to say we were miles ahead of those who headed straight for college. That showed learning on the job is paramount – you simply can’t beat the knowledge of your senior, more experienced peers.
14 February 2024 •
www.acr-news.com
My favourite mentor happened to be a welder who was a sub-contractor and really focused on precision. But there was also another guy who was equally willing to teach but had a very short fuse – he was nicknamed ‘Raging Ray’. One way or another, good colleagues teach you everything you will need to learn to get on. It was simple. Everyone would set you aside a job and then just come in and check on you and leave you to that one job.
Even if that took you all day when it would have taken
an experienced fi tter half a day, it didn’t matter as long as you got it done properly. The learning curve was steep, but what we learned stuck. We made mistakes, but we learned through our own lived experience. Being in an adult environment is an eye opener but you learn how to respect and get on with your elders. We set our own company up in 2017 and have been committed to the apprenticeship model as a means of bringing on and developing new staff . We’ve noticed a massive skills gap. And the volume of young people with the right skills just aren’t coming through. No one we interview
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