UK Construction Online Exclusive: Graham Nicholson, Chair of TAC

UK Construction Online talk exclusively with Graham Nicholson on the importance of apprenticeships in construction industry.

Graham Nicholson is a Chartered Structural and Civil Engineer. He is the Executive Managing Director of Tony Gee and Partners and has over 30 years’ experience of working for the specialist consultancy practice.

Graham chairs the firm’s Executive Board and is responsible for leading the strategic direction of the business. He became a Partner in 1992 and in 2003 took the lead role in the practice. Since then the company has grown from 100 to 400 staff. He has a passion for bridge engineering and has been responsible for the design of some extremely interesting and innovative structures, in particular the Dornoch Firth Bridge and Ceiriog Viaduct which were the longest incrementally launched bridges in the UK at the time. He was Chairman of the Association for Consultancy and Engineering in 2011 and remains on the ACE board responsible for chairing another great passion, the Technician Apprenticeship Consortium (TAC).

How important do you feel apprenticeships are to the UK construction industry at the moment?

They are very important. We have a skills shortage and there’s a need to bring in new blood into the industry, and a very good way of doing that is with apprenticeships. As we know, infrastructure plays a vital role in the industry and we need to bring as many people in as possible.

What are the main benefits for an individual who makes the decision to begin an apprenticeship?

It’s a work based route into engineering and it’s limitless. By taking on an apprenticeship, with suitable capabilities, you can gain those qualifications and effectively reach the very top of the industry. Apprentices can, with suitable qualifications and training, become a chartered engineer. The main benefit is that during their training, they are earning money and gaining very valuable on-the-job training.

To what extent do you think apprenticeships are successful in teaching the correct skills, and therefore having a positive experience in entering the workplace once the apprenticeship in over?

I think that’s for industry to teach their apprentices what they want them to do. It can be very tailored. Our particular business has a very specific set of needs and skills and we are able to teach our apprentices those skills that match our requirements, thus leading to a successful career.

What impact has apprenticeships had on the skills shortage that the construction industry is currently facing?

When I think of TAC, we’ve taken on over 1000 young people and put them through an apprenticeship now. That is 1000 people that perhaps wouldn’t have come into the industry that we’ve managed to encourage in through this route, so TAC has had an impact. We still need to bring more and more apprentices in, so we are hoping the TAC programme and the government will meet the targets, which currently far exceeds what we have at the moment, but it is a work in progress. There is still a huge challenge in trying to attract people into the industry. This is still something we have to work hard at.

What reasons are there for why sometimes apprentices don’t complete their apprenticeship?

You have to bear in mind that some of these apprentices come in at the age of 16 and have no experience of the workplace or work in engineering. For some people, they might find that the industry doesn’t suit what they want. This is usually down to the individual apprentices. We’ve had 2 out of 20 drop out and that’s primarily because they’ve come in and said it isn’t what they thought it was. I think that’s inevitable if you’re going to bring people in that are 16/17 years old who have very little exposure to it. You aren’t going to win them all. But the rest of them think it’s a fantastic career, get really stuck in and have done very well.

Companies give them time to go and study, support them financially and most company’s support them well with their training. Inevitably, I think the fact that you’re taking people in at such a young age means you can’t expect to get 100% record of retaining everyone. They start with an idea of what they think an engineering apprenticeship is, but once they discover that it’s not quite what they thought, they may decide to go and do something different. I think that’s understandable and provided it is only a small level of loss, then it’s something that our industry should be able to accept.

What measures can be taken to allow the successful completion of an apprenticeship?

It’s about mentoring and taking care of the apprentices. If you spend time with them and support them, then they should feel like a very vital part of the workforce. There’s a very specific training programme set out now in the apprenticeship route. There are specific requirements for gaining experiences in different parts of the business. It’s a matter of being able to expose them to this and make sure they can reach all of the objectives that they need, to be able to get their qualification. It’s important that the companies take the training of their apprentices very seriously and not think that it’s just down to the apprentice to do the work.

To become an engineering technician, through the ICE route, there are some very clear objectives and attributes that the apprentices have to achieve. The college will teach them some basic principles but they won’t get experience of managing projects or being able to demonstrate creative thought or being able to work off their own initiative. All of this is something that when placed in a working environment, the apprentice can then demonstrate that they have the ability to work on their own, and to work in teams and make a real impact. By having a mentor, someone can sit down with the apprentice and talk about what they have achieved, and what they hope to achieve – planning out where they are going to do their experience and ensuring they are moved around and get a variety of experience.

Do you think that leaving the EU will have any impact on apprenticeships?

I don’t think we will change what we are doing with apprenticeships because we are leaving the EU. The fundamental thing for the industry at the moment is to ensure our investment in infrastructure is protected. We need to keep our industry busy by building vital infrastructure, which is needed now more than ever as we need to create better connectivity with everyone. However, this will still leave us with the issue of the skills shortage.

Apprenticeships will be a very important way of dealing with that. Not just in short term. Apprenticeships are really building skills for the future. You can take in another 5,000 apprentices now and they will be become very valuable people in the next 4 or 5 years’ time. It won’t directly affect anything in the next one or two years.

I’m optimistic that something positive will come out of this, even if it wasn’t what we initially wanted. It is what is it is, and we will have to work hard to make it work.

There’s a lot of disruption that’s going to come but we just need to be clever and innovative and find ways to deal with it. I think we’re a very resourceful industry and country and we will find a way through this. Who knows, maybe in five years’ time we will look back and think this it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

 

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