College leads new apprentice link-up
Vrooming success...speakers with students during the apprenticeship recruitment evening at Lutterworth College. (Picture: Andrew Carpenter/001396-53)
DOZENS of students linked up with potential employers at a huge apprenticeship evening at Lutterworth College.
The event, last Wednesday, was hosted by the college and saw 21 businesses meet up with students to talk about employment opportunities.
College vice-principal John Redmond said the event had been a huge success.
He added: “This was the first event of its kind that we have held so I was a little nervous about how it would go, but the response was much better than we had expected.
“Over the last couple of years we have been approached by a number of companies wanting to engage with us and our students with a view to taking on apprentices.
“We began to get a sense that there was a shift taking place by some employers away from the traditional routes of employing purely graduates.”
Among the companies who took an opportunity to attend the meeting were accountancy firms PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst and Young, Vauxhall, Marrons Planning Solicitors based in Leicester, Severn Trent, Tower Tools and Trelleborg.
The armed forces and the NHS also had stands.
A number of former Lutterworth College students have been taken on as apprentices at Whetstone-based engineering firm Babcock and Wigston-based Tower Tools in recent years.
Mr Redmond said that, in his opinion, apprenticeships could become more important in the future and one day could be seen as just as important as degrees.
He added: “The world is changing. We couldn’t have predicted the way university education has changed ten years ago, and we don’t know what the situation will be like in another ten years.
“Plus, many parents are looking at tuition fees of £9,000 and realising that their sons and daughters will be losing nine or ten per cent of their income, providing they can find a job after university, to pay that off.”
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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