Apprenticeships have really taken back off again in the last few years.  For some companies, they really buy in to the idea of “growing their own” and helping your career to take off both during and after your studies.

Others use them for cheap labour. 

The latter often underpay you, even when you qualify and then choose not to invest any more time and money in your development.

If that sounds like you, and you did an Electrical Engineering apprenticeship, I might have an interesting job for you to consider.

It’s an Electrical Maintenance Engineer position that’ll probably have a real learning curve to it.  You’ll learn everything there is to know about Siemens 840D, which is a premium software product used to control 5 axis machine tools.

Rather than working on routine maintenance activities, you’ll actually become the “go to” person when it all hits the fan and the team of highly skilled maintenance engineers on site have been stumped by a problem. 

You can probably imagine that might not be an overnight thing.  In the meantime, you’ll be sent on external courses to learn more about the Siemens software and you’ll shadow a team of highly trained engineers who know everything there is to know about high value CNC machines.  You know, the massive ones with enough intricacy to craft the premium Swiss watches your boss probably wears.   

The salary is actually a bit of a weird one with this but I’ll do my best to explain it.  Your basic will probably be somewhere around £35k - £37k, but there’s an expectation that you’ll do a few hours of overtime every week as standard.  That means you’ll be doing 45 hours a week, but actually taking home between £48k and £51k every year by doing those hours. 

There’s more overtime available at the weekend as well, for what it’s worth, but whether or not you do that is completely your choice.

A pretty decent thing is that they do “average holiday pay” – so if you go away, you don’t lose out on the OT you’d normally have done during a week and get paid your holiday pay as standard, plus the overtime pay you’d have been paid based on an average of what you’d been doing up until you went away.

Oh, and you’ll be based on site at BAE in Samlesbury, so you’ll need to be able to get security clearance if you’d like to be considered.

If there’s enough in this for you to feel like it’d be worth a chat, give me a call and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have – (phone number removed).