‘In this position I get to work with high end customers such as Rolls Royce and Siemens and have also been able to travel to our manufacturing plant in Germany and visited customers in Scotland’.
I began my engineering career fourteen years ago at the age of 25, with Finsbury Orthopaedics, who specialised in the design and production of medical devices and surgical implants. I was an ‘apprentice prototype technician’, working as part of a small team to produce first off components for concept designs. This involved a variety of toolroom practices including both manual and CNC turning / milling, surface grinding, bench-work and EDM. As part of my apprenticeship I attended College one day a week over the course of three years, whilst at the same time completing my practical toolmaking modules in the workplace.
Since completing my apprenticeship with Finsbury I have gone on to work for several other engineering companies, further developing my skillset and also returning to College to study for an HNC in mechanical engineering. I am now working for an international company called Tyrolit, who specialise in the production of diamond cutting equipment for both the construction and precision metal industries. I have progressed from a shop floor position to an office based design role, where I use SolidWorks to produce diamond roller dressers, which are used in the aerospace industry for the production of turbine engine components. In this position I get to work with high end customers such as Rolls Royce and Siemens and have also been able to travel to our manufacturing plant in Germany and visited customers in Scotland.
For me, an apprenticeship was the perfect choice, I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the school environment when I was younger so this gave me another way to gain qualifications and having chosen to do it made me more receptive to learning. Also being slightly older, I was already paying a mortgage so being able to still earn money whilst progressing with my career and gaining qualifications was the ideal scenario. I feel I have now settled into a fantastic job which I would not have got anywhere near if it hadn’t been for completing an apprenticeship.
SIGTA and in particular Darryl were a massive help, guiding me through my apprenticeship. He would visit me every month to keep a track on my progress and set me new goals. I was totally in the dark as to what an apprenticeship entailed when I first started but Darryl made it very clear and was always willing to assist. Having completed an engineering apprenticeship himself he was able to empathise with any problems I encountered, such as maintaining a good balance between production work and on job training.
Even though it has been many years since I completed my apprenticeship with SIGTA, Darryl has always made an effort to check in with me to see how things are going. In short, I couldn’t recommend SIGTA enough!
Ed Kerr