George Mellor is in the first year of his four-year apprenticeship at TARMAC. He is completing his Level 2 Performing Engineering Operations and a Level 3 BTEC whilst in the position. George hopes to specialise after his training in maintenance or fitting.
“I studied A Levels before coming to college. I did engineering for one of my A Levels and tried applying for a few apprenticeships with little luck before landing a position at TARMAC. It’s always something I have wanted to do and tried to do for many years. I was happy to start my apprenticeship last year. I am currently purely at college Monday to Friday and start going on-site in the summer. We are doing a 5-year course so that we can do a 4-year course instead of 5. Normally you do your Level 2 PEO before moving to Level 3 but this allows us to get the chunk of classroom work out of the way. I’m excited to see what we will be doing on-site in July, we’ll get a taste of what to expect when we start our training in February.”
“The tutors have been great, really forthcoming with helping us learn and being patient to help us when we are struggling to understand certain things.”
“TARMAC is a quarrying company near Buxton. It is the biggest one in England, specialising in cement, lime and stone production. They also create a bunch of different gradients of stone that can be used. I am a mechanical engineer, so at TARMAC I will specialise in maintenance or fitting. Probably more towards maintenance or machining. I will be happy with either, maintenance is new to me but I am enjoying that the most.”
“There are four of us doing apprenticeships with TARMAC at college. The other three are electrical engineers, I’m the only one doing mechanical engineering. It’s all very similar, where it varies is that they will do PLCs and more electrical theory and I’ll do more mechanical theory and maintenance. TARMAC is great at keeping in contact with us and it’s easy to contact them too. They also bring us every day to college so we can ask the driver questions and information is fed to us through him from our manager too.”
“I chose an apprenticeship because I did my A Levels in engineering, physics and chemistry. I wanted to do my A Levels so that I could go for a higher-level apprenticeship. This allows me to go to degree level and above. I decided on an apprenticeship so that I have a guaranteed job at the end and I can gain work experience years. I could go on to a master’s if I produce good enough results to further my progression. Another reason is with an apprenticeship you earn whilst you are learning and engineering apprenticeships pay quite well.”
“This is my end game, hopefully. Working with TARMAC for a while or moving on to another company, I’ll definitely be sticking with engineering for the long haul as it’s something I’ve always enjoyed.”