Apprentice celebrations at Reliance Precision

Guests were taken on a tour of the company's Huddersfield facility and had the opportunity to meet and talk to apprentices past and present. The Mayor thanked everyone involved for "a truly wonderful morning" with Barry Sheerman MP describing Reliance as a "high-tech company at the cutting edg" that made him feel "tremendously proud of engineering".

Reliance has run an apprentice scheme for over 50 years. It has its own, independently accredited, training school, complemented by courses run by Kirklees College. Managing Director Andrew Wright explains: "Our apprentice scheme is such an important part of our ability to develop the specialist engineering skills we need.

"Reliance works at the extremes of precision engineering, making products to micron tolerances, much less than the width of a human hair. It is essential that we have engineers across a variety of technical disciplines who have been trained to work at these levels."

Of the three apprentices who have qualified this year Bradley Jessop is now working in Production Engineering, Tom Broom in Technical Sales and David Black in Metrology - the science of measurement.

Andrew continues: "We see our apprentices as vital to our future; we set the bar very high on entry to our programme and during the training and we are rewarded consistently by their positive attitude and aptitude for tackling the demanding work we do. We have increased our investment in the programme this year by recruiting 6 apprentices and now have 17 student engineers in training."

The event today strengthened links with local schools with lots of animated dialogue between the employees and teachers during the tour and a challenge from Andrew to the visitors to become "ambassadors for engineering".

For more information about apprenticeships at Reliance please go to www.reliance.co.uk.