Bruntwood begins management apprentices

Learning and development is key to individuals and businesses alike. It shouldn’t stop when you leave education, or reach a certain level in your career, continuous learning helps employees to achieve new goals and take on exciting challenges.

While many people still might think that apprenticeships are for young people who have just left school; over the past couple of years, apprenticeships have been reinventing themselves.

Apprenticeships are no longer reserved for school leavers; they can now be a valuable route as a catalyst for a career change, for pursuing new opportunities; and for people more established in their roles but who are wanting to continue to learn, grow and develop their skills and experience.

They’re also one of the key ways in which government and city region authorities are trying to meet the skills gap and increase our overall productivity as workers. For businesses, upskilling their existing workers is one of the best ways to create a future talent pipeline, increase engagement and motivation, as well as ensure everyone is fully equipped to do their roles.

Earlier this year, 16 brand new Facilities Team Leaders at Bruntwood started new roles as part of a company reshape. With a focus on creating brilliant spaces and spaces, as well as bringing our service mission to life, the new Facilities Team Leaders have spent the last few months getting comfortable in their new jobs - getting to grips with managing new teams and buildings to help them perform to their best, revamping old processes to make experiences for our customers and our colleagues easy and seamless, and putting in new measures to make our buildings run like clockwork.

Since starting in their new roles, other senior members of our team have been expertly coaching and guiding them in their new roles as people managers. But now as the teams continue to develop and the scope of the role continues to evolve, it was time to introduce additional training specifically on all the all-important aspect of people management and team leading- arguably the most important part of any role in the business.

Alongside the internal coaching and mentoring, we have invested into even more support for our Facilities Team Leaders with a Level 3 Management Apprenticeship Programme. The new apprenticeship standards (the contents of the courses) have been created by employer groups who really understand the roles people are doing, and what knowledge, skills, and behaviours a person needs to be fully competent and flourish in their roles.

It’s the first time we’ve run a Management Apprenticeship at Bruntwood, and the first time we’ve launched a large cohort of learners all at the same time but we’re already seeing the impact it’s having on our colleagues. This approach is helping our colleagues to learn and grow, allowing them to shape their roles and take their career in new directions.

We’ve partnered up with The Apprentice Academy which has a great track record in the field of management training. Over the course of the next 15 months, our Facilities Team Leaders will be taking part in self directed learning and team workshops on a whole host of management topics including communication, leading people, self-awareness, project management. They’ll also benefit from individual coaching throughout the course and will complete an end point assessment to finalise the programme.

It’s been great to see just how excited they were about starting this next phase of their career and we can’t wait to see how they all get on.

Find out more about our apprenticeships and careers at Bruntwood here.