Results from the government questionnaire for feedback on our three apprenticeship schemes

You may recall that back in December 2019 I wrote to encourage you to respond to a questionnaire about apprentices, as the government was keen to obtain feedback on our three apprenticeship schemes. The results are now in and they are favourable. Participants liked the standards and there were no fundamental changes identified. We now have support from the government to merge condition monitoring into the standards. The most contentious issue will be over the proposed name changes as participants thought that ‘Operator’ is too vague a job title. A positive outcome is that when we rewrite the NDT Technician scheme we can align it to NVQ Level 4, which presumably means the employer will obtain more funding!

You will be pleased to know that should you pass the four-year Engineer apprenticeship (which includes the IEng interview), you can now be automatically approved for IEng and MInstNDT simultaneously with this four years of experience rather than the normal five. The old rules meant you would have had to wait a further year before reapplying, which BINDT committees thought was overly bureaucratic and did not reflect the practical and theoretical skills you obtain after passing the apprenticeship end-point assessment with satisfactory scores and responsibilities.

Please note that the views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not represent the views of Rolls-Royce.

Iain Baillie is with Lead Employer Rolls-Royce and is involved with the NDT apprenticeships scheme. He is also BINDT President Elect.

Comments by members

This forum post has no comments, be the first to leave a comment.

<< Back