During National Apprenticeship Week 2021 (8th to 14th February), two apprentices from Thurrock are calling on local people and their fellow colleagues to pursue the career they have always wanted by applying now for one of over 1,000 new full-time Amazon apprenticeships available.
Recruitment has started for 25 different apprenticeship schemes ranging from engineering to broadcast production, creative digital design to health, safety and environment technician. 100 degree-level apprenticeships are available in automation engineering, project management, software development and chartered management.
Over 500 new apprenticeships will be offered to Amazon’s existing workforce, providing opportunities to retrain and gain new skills leading to an exciting new career path. Apprenticeships exclusively for Amazon employees range from a team leader through to a coaching practitioner.
The roles pay a minimum of £10.80 p/h in Tilbury up to £30,000 a year for degree-level apprenticeships.
In addition to being fully-funded, apprentices also receive a comprehensive benefits package, including private medical insurance, life assurance, income protection, subsidised meals and an employee discount – which combined are worth more than £700 annually – as well as a company pension plan.
The new apprentices will join current apprentices already working at Amazon Tilbury. The current Amazon apprenticeship schemes have attracted recruits from a range of different backgrounds from a former barista, footballer and photographer, to former military veterans and nurses. Throughout the last year, people have also joined Amazon from construction, customer services, health care, hospitality and sales industries.
Re-an Brooks and Liam Tebbutt, from Thurrock, are a Mechatronics Maintenance Engineering apprentice and an IT Engineering apprentice working at Amazon in Tilbury.
Re-an joined Amazon in 2017 as an associate, before starting the apprenticeship with Amazon in 2019. She became fascinated with the networks and data that allow the Amazon fulfilment centres to function and this sparked her interest in an apprenticeship. Re-an comes from a non-technical background, having worked first in the equine industry, then pursuing a brief career in the care sector.
She believes that joining Amazon is the best thing that could have happened for her career and says she’s had the opportunity to do things she wouldn’t have been able to do elsewhere.
Liam sees his apprenticeship with Amazon as a stepping-stone to become a design engineer, as the hands-on experience he gains with the company will help him to understand the workings of the machines he wants to design.
Liam said: “Amazon’s apprenticeship programme offers you the chance to study at highly regarded colleges in the UK and receive an excellent educational background for all the practical, hands-on experience you gain while working on site.”
Re-an added: “Joining Amazon as an apprentice is the best thing that’s happened in my career so far. The educational support I have received on the apprenticeship has been amazing and I know so much more now than I ever thought I would, especially with no background in IT.”
Carlos Guijarro Benito, Site Leader at Amazon in Tilbury, said: “An Amazon apprenticeship offers an exciting career path, creating opportunities within our local community in Tilbury and helping our own employees retrain and gain new skills at a time when investing in people and jobs has never been more important.”
The 1,000 apprenticeships add to Amazon’s continued commitment to creating jobs and opportunities to learn new skills across the UK. Amazon created 10,000 new permanent jobs in the UK in 2020 alone, and employs more than 40,000 people in some of the most advanced workplaces of their kind in the world with competitive pay, processes and systems to ensure the wellbeing and safety of all employees.
Apprentice programmes last between 14 months and four years and a typical apprenticeship combines theoretical learning with hands-on training, enabling participants to obtain qualifications and degrees and earn money in the process.
Once qualified, apprentices will have the potential to work across Amazon’s UK sites including fulfilment centres, delivery stations, sortation centres and the company’s UK head offices in London and Manchester and the three development centres in Edinburgh, Cambridge and London.
Amazon also offers employees Career Choice, an innovative programme which pre-pays 95% of tuition for courses in high-demand fields, up to £8,000 over four years, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.
Amazon provides opportunities to improve existing skills or learn new ones through internal career progression opportunities such as cross-training, transferring to a different department and promotion into a managerial role.
