Mentoring apprentices

来源：Commercial Motor, 2014, 222(Sep.25 TN.5605).

Last year Emma Bulgin, the human resources manager at Imperial Commercials, completed a dissertation about the benefits of mentoring apprentices. Matt Lawrenson tasked her with putting that theory into practice and in October 2013 the mentoring scheme got under way. "I can see the benefits of having apprentices and I wanted to diminish the negative vibes apprentices get," she says. "From this dissertation came feedback from current apprentices across the Imperial group and past apprentices, benchmarked against other businesses like Bentley and JCB." Bulgin identified that there was no structure to manage apprentices, or advisers who knew how to deal with apprentices professionally. "The first step was to see what apprentices would like and then to ask what the selected mentors would like," she says.