Is a Morson Training rail apprenticeship right for you?
Career journeys all follow different paths. Many take the traditional route, school to college, college to university, university to work but what about those who choose a different path? Apprenticeships are nothing new but are often overlooked. National Apprenticeship Week, which began on Monday, is looking to change that by celebrating the positive impact apprenticeships have on careers, for both the apprentices and those that employ them.
Here, we explore why a Morson Training rail apprenticeship could be right for you.
Morson Training is the award-winning, all-encompassing learning and development division of the Morson Group. The apprenticeship programme, formed in 2014, offers engineering apprenticeships with a range of clients across the rail sector. The programme has always been built upon quality training and wide-ranging experience, with dedicated training centres facilitating face-to-face learning alongside a real-time understanding of the rail industry taking place on-site.
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic lead to many businesses furloughing their apprentices. The delivery of structured learning remotely was seen as an impossible task by many and led to many apprentices leaving their studies behind. Morson Training sought a solution for this. Pre-empting the impact this would have on the rail industry long-term, they readdressed and overhauled the apprenticeship landscape, providing a way for them to continue their programme with Morson Training.
Following government instruction, creating an academic environment that was accessible, adaptable and consistent became essential in ensuring our 2020 cohort of apprentices, and those who followed could complete their qualifications. Investment in a new online teaching programme and providing new laptops to the apprentices enabled students to log in from home and complete assessments and undertake regular reviews.
All this led to Morson Training being able to continue providing first-class training and meant our existing cohort convert our enhanced apprenticeship wage into a real-time earning wage within a few months, as planned.
Being able to continue as planned was hugely important to our teams for several reasons. Our culture is based on nurturing and engaging people, so it was essential for our apprentices to know that the business wouldn’t turn its back on them. They became integral to changing the industry; they inadvertently became the pilots of a brand-new approach to apprenticeships.
Secondly, our apprenticeship model has always been based on sustainability; we recruit, train and employ our own staff, which means the programme is a loss-maker in the immediate term. But doing so created a sustainable future.
Additionally, apprentices who qualify with us are four times more likely to gain a senior position with a rail contractor. This means our team are essential in delivering the niche skillsets the industry requires now and into the future. It was unquestionable to allow the Coronavirus to create an open-ended break in this process; doing so would’ve been a major threat to the sector’s future.
To read the full article on Morson Training, click here or if you are interested in finding out more about an apprenticeship contact Simon Saxby, simon.saxby@morson.com
