Employee Sucess stories for March 2010
Caroline Jackson female apprentice painter & decorator has attended college learning how to be a painter & decorator, but could not get a job to gain the site experience needed to convert her qualification into an NVQ. Caroline contacted George Jones before Christmas 2008 on a Friday afternoon and informed us we are the 23rd firm she had phoned that week. This is a common problem for school / college leavers as she had been unemployed for over 6 months.
Caroline impressed our Area Manager with her tenacity and so decided to give her a go (key point here is that the Area managers are very supportive of these types of initiatives and without this commitment it wouldn’t work)To start with Caroline was very slow, however she slowly improved, time keeping got better, and she reached a point where she was a good painter after 18 months or training and investment. The problem was she was some way off the pace. As we had no experience of female painters in our North West teams, her slowness was being put down to “being femalel” However, we knew that Nikita our Southern female painter had been through the same thing previously and had come through to be a valued employee, so it was decided in consultation with all perties that Caroline should go to London for a couple of weeks to work alongside Nikita. The aim of this was to show her that it was possible for her to be as good as the men, and to give her some experience of being with another team.
This was a great success and as a result she came back fully committed and keen. Caroline has now gone on to achieve an acceptable level of production, but we will continue to support her efforts in becoming as production as her work colleagues.
Local Employment
Whilst working on the Woodchurch Estate for Wirral Partnership Homes, we were approached by the leader of the Youth Club to ask if we could offer any of the lads a job. The problem the youth club was finding was that in some cases the children who were born on the estate and went to school on the estate had no real knowledge of life beyond the estate. When they leave school, they hang around the estate and go to the youth Club until they are 24, but with no real prospect of getting a job since most of the work done on the estate is organised by off-site businesses.
As a result, we took on 2 lads, both aged 19. We collected them from the estate and took them to work in Rock Ferry in order to give them a chance of learning the job of fence painting without any distractions
After 6 months one of them had fallen by the wayside, but one stuck with it and impressed the foreman with his commitment
As a result, after 18 months we put him forward to be a CITB apprentice. He has now been at college since last September and has recently been put forward by Wirral Met to be their representative in the North West heats of the National “Painter of the Year” competition
