Careers Event for Apprenticeships
Moortown Group recently had the pleasure of attending a career event hosted by York College on Monday 1st November. We were thrilled to be invited to this Open Doors event, where hundreds of 16-18 year olds began exploring their possible career options. The College runs this event several times a year, but for us, this was Moortown’s first appearance there.
Our aim was to engage with lots of students who were open to the idea of a career in construction, especially those who knew very little about what was on offer. Often, so many students do not know or even hear of the roles and opportunities in this industry, and they were pleasantly surprised to hear how they could relate school subjects that they enjoyed to a promising career path. It was particularly fantastic to see several female students enquiring about careers in Engineering and Plant Operations, and being able to speak face to face with our existing apprentices really boosted their interest in pursuing it further. Currently, we have a handful of brilliant apprentices working at Moortown that are at various different stages of their training and learning journey. In the past month, we have recruited another student who is currently studying to be an Engineer and is now gaining work experience with Moortown whilst undertaking his second year of study through York College.
Why we chosen to taken on a work placement student? 
We felt it was important to give young potential talent the opportunity to see first-hand the realities of the working world. By doing this, they can see for themselves if this is something that appeals to their interests. Work placements give people the chance to have a little taste at what’s on offer, with fairly low risk involved on both sides. In recent years, we have successfully taken on a very small number of students who have stayed with us and progressed onto more senior roles. The business is in a fortunate position to support more individuals who have an interest in construction, and possess a keen ‘work-hard’ ethic. The industry itself needs to keep making a real effort by investing in the next generation in order to prevent a huge skills gap, and providing work placements and apprenticeships is one way of doing so. We want to play our part in supporting future employment.
How does it benefit our Company?
Many of our employees at Moortown have been part of the company for years and years. We are very honoured to have such a high staff retention, which we believe is testament to the genuine work culture we have here. We see the value in welcoming future generations to our team, who come on board to be nurtured and supported on their career journey, and later become a well-established individual. The benefits are felt by everyone when a company cares about who they bring into their workforce. A lot of our site teams have been brilliant in providing guidance to our apprentices and trainees by taking them under their wing to learn and progress further into the business.
How do you think Students benefit from work placements? 
There are several ways in which students benefit, whether it be from learning about the construction industry all round, the nature of works within the subcontracting sector or learning some technical knowledge. We often hear from our apprentices and trainees that they feel their confidence levels have increased and their communication skills have all improved significantly. The feedback we’ve had has been very positive, and described as an enjoyable experience that can be very challenging but highly rewarding. All of our apprentices have said that they much prefer working in a ‘hands-on’ environment because you learn so much in a short time. Classroom learning provides the theory and assignment structure needed to qualify, but our apprentices have acknowledged that the real learning is out on-site.