College News

QE Student Engineers a Bright Future

Miles Jackson, a second year student on QE’s Future Engineers Scheme, has been successful in securing a degree level apprenticeship with Arup, the multinational professional services firm which provides engineering, design, planning and project management for aspects of the built environment.  Miles made contact with the recruitment team from Arup at QE’s Employment & Gap Year Fair earlier in the year and, after an initial application with on-line tests, he was invited to the company for an assessment day followed by an individual interview. 

Miles was amongst 40 prospective applicants and he did extremely well to be offered a position as an apprentice building services engineer.   Miles, who is studying A levels in Maths, Computer Science and Physics, will move to Solihull to begin his training once he has finished his studies. Then, after completing his HNC, he will progress to a full degree.  Miles says “I am really pleased to have been offered this opportunity – my advice to students seeking apprenticeships is to make sure you do your research on the company you are applying to. I took my computing coursework with me and talked to them about how I had applied a design process, implemented and tested it; I used it as an example as to when I had faced a challenge.  This certainly worked and they were impressed that I had brought it along. I would also say, have a question to ask the employer. I asked about progression opportunities – it is definitely not a good idea to ask about pay!”

Miles concludes, “I am really looking forward to new challenges and to applying my knowledge from my A levels to real life projects.”

Liz Bryan, Future Engineers Co-ordinator adds “Miles has always been determined that he would get an apprenticeship, he was proactive in seeking out opportunities and always made sure that he had thoroughly researched the companies he applied to – he certainly deserves this success and we wish him well.”