APPRENTICESHIPS
M
FEATURE
elissa Smart is the first, newly qualified electrician of our agency’s flexible apprenticeship scheme. She has just won the BESA Wales Electrical Apprentice of the Year award, presented in a ceremony by our managing director, Paul Ingram. Pier Consulting Ltd’s Flexible Apprenticeship scheme was developed in 2014 for mechanical and electrical apprenticeships in the South West and Wales. Our main business is offering temporary and permanent recruitment services for the construction and building services industries, but we decided to offer this scheme in association with BESA after seeing a gradual decline in new entrants to the industry and a widening skills gap. As an agency with existing clients, we make the introduction between apprentices rigorously vetted by our training provider, BESA, and employers who are keen to take on apprentices, but may not be able to make the commitment of the full threefour years of training. We then deal with all the payroll and paperwork, whilst BESA offers pastoral care and organises training through Cardiff and Vale College.
Fully qualified Melissa is our first apprentice to become fully qualified. Having started on a placement for Weston Electrical Services back in 2015, she moved on to work with Nailsea-based Phaze Electrical Ltd, assisting in electrical installations of luxury apartments (Cardiff Pointe), hotels, a care home and student accommodations (Howard Gardens) in Cardiff and Bristol. She demonstrated her abilities and has had a range of on-site experiences, from pulling cable and snagging to helping out in the office, checking drawings and completing reports. At the end of her apprenticeship, she had the initiative to ask for supervisory experience and had men twice her age looking for her direction, in addition to completing testing on-site.
BREAKING BOUNDARIES The gender gap in the electrical industry is common knowledge – but Pier Consulting tells ECN about the success story of one female apprentice who has overcome the obstacles.
She has now been taken on permanently by Phaze Electrical, where she was the first female electrician on any of their sites and has aspirations of project management for the future. Melissa was discouraged from taking up an apprenticeship whilst in college, instead advised to study electrical engineering at university. She does not regret her decision to work on the tools and learn the industry from the ground up.
Melissa Smart is dreaming big, with aspirations of project management in her future.
Melissa’s story About women in the electrical industry Melissa says, “There is a wariness about accepting women in this industry, but it is slowly changing. I have felt a difference even in the last four years. “You do need to have a thick skin,” she adds. “My advice would be to stay open-minded. If someone talks to you in the wrong manner, then call them up on it from the start.
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