“Our apprentices will be future leaders”

Over the last year, SUEZ UK has actively engaged with the opportunity the levy has provided in terms of the development of our people in a vast array of apprenticeship training programmes: from administration roles to mechanical engineers, from entry and under-graduate qualifications to MBAs.

Together with our comprehensive suite of internal training and development programmes, apprenticeships are helping to drive our talent agenda.

We are also committed to developing a greater range of vocational courses and increasing the quantity and quality of apprenticeships for SUEZ UK and our wider industry.

The next generation

We currently have two apprentices working in our payroll teams. The first is our payroll apprentice Thomas Brannigan. His role has been very important in developing a new payroll approach and process for our frontline workforce, which equates to more than 3,000 employees. The previous process required significant manual processing and data input, resulting in data inaccuracy and a high volume of payroll queries.

Working as a core part of a project team, Brannigan, alongside the payroll manager, HR system manager, other managers, business administrators and some other stakeholders, conducted a diagnostic of the current payroll processes for this large cohort of staff and subsequently designed and successfully implemented it to a pilot group. It has been a success and will be rolled out to an additional group of around 350 plus staff before the end of the year.

The second apprentice is Sam Stokes-Garton, he works with our HR systems manager in the development of our HR systems and the continuous improvement of our information reporting and day-to-day operations. He acts as a first line support for all queries sent to the HR systems team and feedback from our business, managers and people. He provides outstanding customer service both within SUEZ UK and in the information provided to SUEZ Group.

Building talent from within

Both of our apprentices continue to impress me with their ‘can do’ attitude towards their work and studies. We’re delighted to have been able to tap into these modern apprenticeship programmes, enabling us to upskill and progress the talent within our teams.

We believe our apprentices will be future leaders and my feelings are shared by our HR director, Tracey Leghorn. She said: “They have made a phenomenal contribution to our success in payroll and HR over the last year or more.

“Having been involved in wider business projects, they have impressed our business managers to an extent that has them keen to also integrate apprentices into their own areas of the business.

“We are proud of our award-winning apprenticeship programme at SUEZ UK and all our learners who are helping SUEZ UK continually transform and be the best that we can be for our customers.”