Gripple Ltd

In terms of the Apprentices that we take on at gripple we've taken on maintenance engineering Apprentices for as long as we've been going, but in recent years we've taken Apprentices in different areas of the business, business administration, I.T, quality.

We find that apprentices really enrich our culture, we're a company that prides ourselves on innovation, new products, new ideas, improving things and streamlining. We've embedded the Apprentices really well into our business and that works really well with The Sheffield College. We tend to recruit our Apprentices in advance of them starting at the college so they get used to being within the business, used to being in a working environment as some of them may have come straight from school and never worked before in industry. We bring them in and buddy them up with experienced members of staff, who understand the job role but also have an affinity with young people and work well with young people.

We chose to work with The Sheffield College because of their flexibility, we've worked with training providers before that have been fairly inflexible, that's the course, that's the pathway, that's how it's going to work. The Sheffield College had a lot more flexible collaborative approach and took the time to understand what what the role was that the Apprentice would be doing and what we were looking to get out of it, and would listen to us and could tweak the course slightly to to meet that role and that was the main attraction really with The Sheffield College.

If employers aren't sure about whether to take on an Apprentice I would say absolutely do it, it benefits the business bringing in new ideas, it benefits the Apprentice themselves of course, I think it's fantastic to offer, particularly young people an opportunity to develop and grow within a business. It's tough out there for young people at the moment particularly over the past couple of years so if you can give local young people opportunity then absolutely do it it enriches the business and the culture.