For the past 2 days we have welcomed 30 Year 10 students from Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough on a work tour right here at JH Mechanical Services.

The students had shown interest in the engineering sector in school and wanted to know more about the different career paths they could potentially embark on.

In previous years, Year 10 students would often take part in 1 week work placements with various businesses in the area to get a feel of what life is like working full time.

Unity City Academy now organise shorter work tours instead, meaning the students can get a more developed understanding of different industries.

Of course, not all students know what they want to do at the age of 15, so these work tours are a great opportunity to ask questions and speak with industry specialists like ourselves.

As part of their tour, we took the students to one of sites at Bamburgh Court in Hartlepool where a full boiler plant installation was taking place.

After a Health and Safety briefing, the students met one of skilled engineers Simon Henderson and apprentice Richie Horkan.

Many of the students had expressed that they were thinking of progressing onto an apprenticeship after sitting their GCSE’s, so this was a fantastic insight into what they could potentially getting up to as an apprentice at JH Mechanical Services.

 

Back at the office, the students met two ambassadors from Teesside University’s  engineering programmes who spoke to the students about the courses available to study within the engineering sector and special interest was shown to the Aerospace Engineering options!

To end the tour, Laura Kirkpatrick from Endeavour Partnership popped in to introduce the students to employment law, an area of law that is often overlooked but is very interesting.

The students showed great enthusiasm to learning about the law side of things with the majority expressing that they would never have thought about a career in employment law.

Laura said: “I’ve had a really positive morning speaking to these pupils about their future career paths and how to get into the legal sector. 

I was really impressed with their questions and I hope it expanded their minds ready for their next steps in what are a very important few years in their education paths.”

As a business, we thoroughly enjoyed opening our doors to the next generation of young engineers.

As a business we are passionate about giving young people in education opportunities to experience the real world of work in their chosen industry so we loved having them here with us and hope to see them again very soon.

The feedback we had from the students was inspiring to hear and we wish them the best of luck in their next steps.