Yamazaki Mazak has chosen to celebrate National Apprenticeship Week 2020 (3-7 February) with an innovative twist, by allowing the company’s current crop of young engineering talent to turn the tables on the senior management and interview them on their own careers in the manufacturing industry.

Mazak currently employs 48 apprentices and has trained in excess of 200 in recent years across a range of different disciplines, including production, service and business administration. Over one third of the current employees at the machine tool manufacturer’s European in Worcester began their careers as an apprentice, including 53 of whom undertook a Mazak apprenticeship.

In honour of National Apprentice Week 2020, the company invited a selection of its current class of 47 apprentices to put their own questions on a career in engineering to a selection of senior staff, including Managing Director UK & Ireland Sales Division, Alan Mucklow; General Manager – European Sales Engineering, Lawrence McCann; and Spindle Service Centre Manager, Dave Clarke.

The questions were recorded as part of a new video, which premiered at the start of National Apprentice Week, and can be accessed here.

Alan Mucklow, Managing Director UK & Ireland Sales Division at Yamazaki Mazak, commented: “Anyone who has ever visited our Worcester facilities over the years will have caught several glimpses of eager blue-shirted employees to-ing and fro-ing across the site, often in tow with one or more of our senior engineers. These are the Mazak apprentices, on whose shoulders the future of our company, and – arguably – the machine tool industry, lies.

“Without doubt, our apprentice scheme is one of the cornerstones of our operations here in Worcester. As a former apprentice myself, I can offer first-hand ratification as to the solid foundation such a route lays down for you in our industry, and the ceremony in which we present newly qualified apprentices with their first grey shirt of a full-time engineer always fills me with great pride.”

He concludes: “Speaking on behalf of all of us who took part in the video, it was great fun to connect with the apprentices in such a fun way. They asked a lot of intriguing questions, and I hope people enjoy watching the video as much as we did participating in it.”

For more details on Mazak’s apprenticeship programme, please visit: www.mazakeu.co.uk/careers.