Engineering and Manufacturing

Don’t be put off by barriers or misconceptions around T Levels.  As long as your procedures, your machines have got the correct guarding, you’ve got your risk assessments, there’s absolutely nothing to fear.  The reason we offer placement for T Level learners is because we are creating a pipeline of talent.  Recruitment is tough.  This takes one of the concerns away.  We looked at the skills that we required. We want it to be bespoke for Heco, and that’s exactly what it is. 

T Level learners could go on to a level three apprenticeship, a level four apprenticeship, and also they may choose to fill some roles which are, are vacant in our operator section.

So our students come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They rotate through a number of departments, our CNC department, our large ring cell department, our projects department, where they learn more manual skills as in turning and milling.  They also go into our grinding shop.  They go into our assembly shop and also our quality and inspection department. 

So they get a well-rounded training and a good foundation of learning .  And what we’re seeing now is that our apprentices will show our T Level students how to do things.  And, uh, while they’re doing that, they’re reflecting on their own practice by ask, asking themselves a question.  Am I explaining this in the  right way?

I know that there are some concerns in different companies.  You know, with health and safety, 80% of our, our machines are, are CNC, but we’ve not found it an issue at all.  We have our own processes, our procedures, risk assessments on each machine.  Really, we don’t we don’t treat them any differently yo first year apprentices. 

The challenges that we faced weren’t with Exeter College.  They were actually with our stakeholders here at HepcoMotion.  They were concerned that we were gonna take employees away from their manufacturing roles, and we would lose time and it would affect our customer service.  This was very much not the case.  As we engaged our trained mentors with our T Level students, we realised that our mentors were actually enjoying what they were doing.  It was enriching their day jobs.  We were getting good feedback on our learners, and as we became better at it, we saw some real improvements in staff morale.  And the staff were very keen once they saw the impressive results. 

These students are very capable.  They’re gonna become apprentices and they’re gonna be able to hit the ground running. 

The short term benefits to the business are that these students come in and they make a real contribution to production.  These T Level learners make me proud every day in a very short period of time.  They are doing really good work.  They listen, they surprise me, you know, to think that they’re probably got another two years before they become an apprentice and they’re already running machines.  I, I, I think is phenomenal, really.  I think that other companies need to get involved with T Levels. 

For me, it’s a complete no brainer.