When is a house not a home? When it’s the new Clarkson Evans apprentice training house, of course.

Based inside the firm’s training centre in Gloucester, Clarkson Evans’ new artificial abode aims to reproduce the working conditions found within a real house for the hundreds of people who train there each year, providing a valuable resource, especially for those who are too young to go on site.

It also facilitates the arrangement of more challenging scenarios for skilled electricians. “It’s available for the more experienced ones who want a bit of extra practice without the pressure of customers breathing down their necks,” explains head of electrical training Jon Dicken.

On the ground floor, there is a fully functional kitchen and sitting room. Head upstairs, and the residence boasts a central heating boiler donated by Worcester Bosch, a bedroom and a bathroom that has been specially painted to show visual reminders of special locations such as wet zones.

The house contains all the electrical components found in a modern home and will prove a great asset for training and assessing technical skills in various areas, including testing and fault finding.

Each cable is wired to a central control point and staff can introduce faults. This provides an ideal accompaniment for the new fault finding course which Clarkson Evans now offers.

“Before we built the facility, trainees would have to practise everything on boards and bays. It just seemed like a very two dimensional way of doing things, as it was all on one level,” says Dicken. “Now they have to get step ladders out instead of just moving a couple of feet. It makes things a lot more real.”

The house cost £50 000, and was built using the prize money Clarkson Evans received after winning an Edge Employer Award in 2005. According to managing director Steve Evans, it was worth every penny. “It’s a unique facility, which we talked about getting for a number of years, and it’s been really welcomed by everyone,” he says, adding: “There’s always been a divide between what happens at the centre and what goes on in the real world. In the past, we had to arrange for our apprentices to go out on site, but it was always difficult to find houses that were at the right stage.”

Training accounts for £1.1 million of the company’s overall revenues, but according to Evans, money was never the sole purpose. “It’s all about bringing in bright young things and investing in the future,” he explains. “If you’re a gardener, you’ll know that you have to plant your sapling now in order to get a fully mature tree in five years time.”

The training montage

  • Clarkson Evans was formed in 1981 by Steve Evans, who was joined a few years later by former apprentice Steve Clarkson.

  • The company, which has an annual turnover of £15 million, now employs 300 people who work on 7000 new homes every year.

  • Its training centre started life as a small in-house service, but is now a thriving profit centre, providing £1.1 million of the firm’s revenues.

  • In 2005, just two years after gaining Centre for Vocational Excellence (CoVE) accreditation, the company became one of only 2% of providers in the country to be awarded grade one (outstanding) for leadership and management by the Adult Learning Inspectorate.

  • It now trains more than 900 people every year. “Traditionally, people thought of their local colleges for electrical training. We wanted to get them thinking Clarkson Evans. Our lecturers tend to be more motivated, driven and focused,” says managing director Steve Evans.

  • Around 120 of the contractor’s own apprentices, split evenly into three year groups, train within the new house annually, in addition to 50 or 60 trainees from other companies.

  • The firm receives around 200 apprenticeship applications every year, selecting only the 40 or so who it feels have what it takes to become successful electricians.

  • Clarkson Evans won one of this magazine’s Building Services Awards in June 2006 for the best training initiative in its sector, after developing an in-house scheme that accepts responsibility for all aspects of apprentice training, including technical certificates, key skills, on-the-job learning, NVQ assessment and AM2 tests.

  • The firm was awarded the Edge Employer Award in 2005 and 2006. Last year, it was the medium category regional winner for the South West and also one of four national winners.

    • Source

    Electrical and Mechanical Contractor

    Postscript

    Go to www.clarksonevans.co.uk for more information.