Every year, each office elects a final-year management trainee to plan and deliver a community project, with just £500 seed money. Our trainees engage with local stakeholders and charity partners, galvanising our people and supply-chain partners to support. In 2021, all challenges were guided by Now or Never.
Read more about what our trainee challenger from Wales & West, Jamie Robins achieved…
Jamie created an employability workshop to help young unemployed people gain experience in the construction industry.
He partnered with Inspire2Work, a social funded project which helps 16-24 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) individuals find work. All five participants Jamie and his team supported were unemployed, had no previous experience in the construction industry and joined the training from a range of difficult circumstances, such as living in supported accommodation.
Alongside his team, Jamie devised and delivered a two-week programme in conjunction with ARC Training and Acorn Recruitment. The programme covered topics from employability skills, to traffic marshalling and handling plant machinery, to manual handling and health and safety.
It resulted in all participants taking and passing their CSCS card tests. Two out of the five participants went on to find employment outside of construction, and a further two were offered positions on site through Acorn Recruitment.
The Wales & West team also led a TikTok campaign to inspire the next generation, posting short films of Willmott Dixon people at work from site managers to those working in sustainability, showcasing ‘a day in the life of’. To pull the short films together, Jamie engaged with a local college, which enabled two media students without any prior work experience gain new skills. The videos achieved almost 2,000 views in total.
