AutoRaise celebrates National Apprenticeship Week in style #FireItUp

AutoRaise celebrates National Apprenticeship Week in style.

AutoRaise have been engaged with numerous activities during what Bob Linwood, the charity’s CEO, describes as “the biggest week of the year. Here, AutoRaise provide some insight on what’s been going on….

“Life never seems to slow down at AutoRaise at the best of times” explains Bob,

“but this week is just massive for us. Monday saw us setting up camp at EMTEC College for a three-day programme of meetings and conferences to celebrate this important week. We have been able to build on the momentum that started at the beginning of the year and the numbers we are starting to achieve on all of the platforms we are working on is astonishing. Looking at the social media activity across our industry during National Apprenticeship Week, it is evident that many repairers are firmly on the apprentice recruitment journey.  It is really encouraging to see businesses have listened to our messages and are taking direct action to solve our skills crisis by bringing young people into our industry.”

The AutoRaise events this week included an “Apprenticeship Information Day”, held at EMTEC College in Ruddington on Tuesday with nearly 60 members of the Vehicle Repair industry community gathered to hear some success stories from existing employers of Apprentices – Dave Sargeant from Gemini ARC and Marc Holding of The Vella Group – along with presentations from Nick Sweetman of Enterprise Rent A Car and AutoRaise’ very own Indra Nauth, Head of Education and Learners.

The day was aimed at encouraging repairers to take on apprentices, embrace this opportunity to address their own skills issues and work with AutoRaise to guide them through the journey. Feedback gathered from attendees has been 100% positive with a number of Repairers asking to become AutoRaise Affiliated and to request help in finding them apprentices.

On Wednesday, representatives from a number of repairers gathered at EMTEC to assess a proposed AutoRaise Mentoring Programme. “It’s important that any new and untried initiatives are sense checked by the repairer community before AutoRaise launch any new initiatives in to the market place” explains Bob.

“The input and collaboration was key and we established that we have a great proposition for repairers and an opportunity to further develop a programme for apprentice buddies. Helping repairers retain their apprentices is core to the AutoRaise Academy approach and we can now make more detailed plans for the launch of this exciting initiative”.

Thursday saw AutoRaise supporting an LV= repairer event held at EMTEC. AutoRaise work closely with LV= as their Platinum Partner and this was a perfect opportunity to convey this relationship and continue spreading the word about how AutoRaise can help repairers with their apprenticeship journey.

Reflecting on National Apprenticeship Week, Bob says

“We have taken some significant steps forward this week: we have created active interest from at least a dozen new repairers to help them, we have placed four AutoRaise Cadets with employers, we have received more enquiries from training providers about delivering the multi-skilled apprenticeship and we are still receiving enquiries about starting an apprenticeship from young people through our young people engagement platform. It’s been absolutely brilliant, we are incredibly grateful to EMTEC for allowing us to host our events and we now have the job of processing and managing all of this new opportunity!”