Commercial Profile
Fantastic opportunity to earn and learn at the same time Apprenticeships offer a platform from which young people can go on to enjoy rewarding and varied careers. Here, one of Northumbrian Water’s current Apprentices and a company manager who started out on an Apprenticeship in 1975 talk about their experiences. Mark Ireland
Mark Ireland, Higher Degree Apprentice, Northumbrian Water
I finished my A-Levels in my home town of South Shields last year and had my eye on university, but when the chance to join Northumbrian Water on a Higher Degree Apprenticeship in Information Services came along, it was too good an opportunity to miss. The decision was down to the question of how I want to learn. My dyslexia is always in the background of my learning, so I don’t like academia very much and the Apprenticeship was a chance to learn in a different way. I started in September and the course runs for three years, with myself and the nine other Higher Degree Apprentices attending the University of Sunderland once a week. We are each assigned to projects and I am currently working on Northumbrian Water’s Digital Ambition Programme, looking at how our customers engage with us now and in the future, and, similarly, a customer engagement platform, which is currently going through testing. Hopefully, I will see them both through to completion. At the end of the Apprenticeship, I am going to be able to go into an interview with a CV containing a degree and three years of experience in the workplace. The vocational and the academic side of the programme are very much interlocked and, combined, they will give me a massive foot on the career ladder.
Ray Baldwin
Ray Baldwin, Company Maintenance Manager, Northumbrian Water
In 1975, I joined British Coal as an Apprentice Electrician at Ashington Colliery, in Northumberland. The decision was based upon parental guidance and advice from my tradesman dad, who said: “Get yourself a trade son, you will get work anywhere.” I was 16 and spent four years on the Apprenticeship. After that, I stayed at British Coal and became an engineer, right up until 1985 when, following the Miners’ Strike, I left to join a private mining company, going back to being an electrician. It was in 1990 that I joined Northumbrian Water as an electrician, based at the sewage treatment works in Howdon, North Tyneside. Since then, I’ve experienced a lot of roles within the company, in water treatment, wastewater treatment, commercial contracts in Scotland and Ireland and eventually back into maintenance. If I look at the job I have now – Company Maintenance Manager – and the experiences and positions I’ve held in the last 42 years, my decision to do an Apprenticeship was absolutely the right choice for me and one I would not change even with the benefit of hindsight. Back then I could never have imagined being where I am now and it was the Apprenticeship that started it all.
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