Leyland Trucks is making the best of its internal talent through the Career Pathway Scheme it set up last year.

It offers employees full-time training across a broad range of engineering roles, to improve their skillset and widen career options.

Employees can dedicate 100% of their time to learning, leaving their current role, and embarking on a two-year plan with structured rotations across assembly engineering, supplier quality assurance and design engineering.

“The scheme is proving really popular with employees and has already showed great promise. Taking people out of their current roles and putting them into full-time training represents a significant investment for us. However, we recognise that we are fortunate to have a bank of talented and committed people already employed at Leyland, so we wanted a post-apprentice package specifically aimed at nurturing and developing their skills,” said Ivan Shearer, HR director at Leyland Trucks.

Participants are encouraged to complete further education engineering or project management courses, to expand the applied learning gained on each rotation.

Leyland Trucks created the programme to make sure the talent fostered in its apprentice scheme was fully nurtured, and to give its locally-based work force additional opportunities to further their professional education.

In order to qualify, employees took part in a rigorous interview process including maths and verbal reasoning tests, along with panel interviews.

James Smithies (pictured) is currently taking part in the scheme.  He said: “I left school at 16 and completed the apprenticeship scheme at Leyland Trucks. The Career Pathway Programme seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to gain a wider knowledge of the overall business and to learn a number of new engineering disciplines that I had not previously had any exposure to.

“It has already given me many new opportunities to apply my knowledge, interact professionally with senior managers and external stakeholders, raise my professional profile within the company and learn a number of new skills.

“Upon completion of the scheme, I would like to think that I will be a well-rounded engineer who would be considered for a number of different roles within the business and have the confidence and skills to be successful in any of them.”