All aboard!
BAE to invest in skills by hiring record 1,250 trainees next year
DEFEnCE giant BaE systems will create 1,250 jobs next year when it takes on a record number of trainees.
The group will hire 850 apprentices and 400 graduates – more than half of which will be based in the north of England in a boost for the Government’s aim to ‘level up’ the regions.
Many will work at its hubs in Barrow, Preston and Blackburn.
BaE is taking on 200 more graduates than it did this year, and 50 more apprentices for huge projects including the Dreadnought submarines and designs for a new UK fighter jet, called Tempest.
richard Hamer, the company’s human resources director for education and skills, said: ‘These are areas that are more economically challenged and where we need to invest in new skills.’
Ten years ago the group was hiring about 150 graduates and 300 apprentices per year.
In total BaE has nearly 88,000 employees in dozens of countries, with more than 34,000 in the UK.
senior staff such as the managing director of BaE’s air division, Chris Boardman, and former BaE chief executive Mike Turner began as apprentices.
around 10pc of apprentices are over the age of 25 and looking for a career change. The oldest person it took on in 2020 was 44.
Mark Donlevy, 38, completed a fouryear combat systems engineer programme this year and is a senior combat systems engineer and the lead for CCTv on ships.
The father of two, who works in Glasgow, quit his job as a nightclub manager in 2014.
He said: ‘I started to realise I was losing my enthusiasm for the late-night industry as my kids got older. I wanted a better work-life balance. I was 32 and looked at it and realised I had well over half of my working life left and I wanted to do engineering again.’
BaE has hired a higher percentage of women – around a quarter – than much of the industry.
about a quarter of its graduate intake are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, though it is only around 5.5pc for apprentices. Hamer said this was mostly because many of the areas that it hires from are not very ethnically diverse.
Companies expect a rise in people applying for apprenticeships as the mass redundancies triggered by the Covid crisis force people to retrain.
But Hamer said BaE, whose apprenticeship scheme does not close until February, had not yet seen a surge in older applicants. last month, it raised profit forecasts after its factories stayed open during the pandemic.
It finished projects such as building patrol boats despite tighter restrictions at its plants.
and it will also benefit from slightly lower tax rates than expected, it said in a surprise stock market update.