The 7th -13 February 2022 marks National Apprenticeship Week 2022, the 15th annual week-long celebration of apprenticeships in the UK. The week-long national event brings together businesses and apprentices across the country to shine a light on the positive impact that apprenticeships make to individuals, businesses and the wider economy.
To get a taste of what working at Daxtra looks like for our apprentices and how their careers can progress we asked some of our current employees who went through the apprenticeship scheme to share some of their experiences.
Our Apprenticeship Success Stories
Ross Eaton started at Daxtra as an Apprentice Account Manager in 2018. After successfully completing his apprenticeship, Ross was promoted to Junior Account Manager in 2019. Due to his hard work, he gained a further promotion in 2020 to his current role of EMEA Account Manager. He is now responsible for training and looking after clients across the EMEA region.
Ross comments: "When I first started as an apprentice at Daxtra, my role involved helping other Account Managers with their day to day tasks. I then progressed to managing my own small batch of clients, and as I gained more experience, this pool of clients grew, and I now manage a mixture of enterprise-level and medium-sized business accounts."
"I really enjoy the responsibility that comes with managing accounts. I'm only three to four years into my role, and I'm already managing recruitment agency accounts with two to three hundred users of our software. This responsibility has helped me grow professionally and personally. I'm even looking to buy my first house soon!"
Working alongside Ross in the Client Services team are Eisha Hamid and Nathan Gallagher, who have both recently completed their apprenticeships and been promoted to Junior Account Manager roles. Kyle Tait recently joined the team as an Apprentice Project Coordinator.
John Scott, Head of Client Services at Daxtra, comments, “We started the apprenticeship scheme in 2017. Since then, it’s been great to see members of our teams complete their apprenticeships and grow their careers with Daxtra while providing excellent service to our customers.”
At Daxtra, we also employ apprentices in testing and engineering roles. Several members of our current engineering team have come through the apprenticeship scheme. Robbie Greenan started as an apprentice in the Testing team in 2017, joining the Support team once he completed his apprenticeship in 2018. He now works on our US Installations team, working on setting up new systems for our US clients.
Robbie comments: "When I first started at Daxtra, I worked on testing customer set ups and product versions before release. After completing my apprenticeship, I moved into helping fix customer issues with the Support team and then onto setting up new systems for clients with the US Installations team. I've enjoyed continually progressing in different roles here and constantly learning more and improving my knowledge within each one."
Julia Dobie joined as an Apprentice Tester and is now Automation Testing Engineer. Alex Fox and Travis Patterson both started as Apprentice Support Engineers and were promoted to Trainee Engineers in 2021. Another three members of the team are currently in the process of completing their apprenticeships - Laurence Haywood, Ryan Leslie and Sean Mullen.
Roberto Merlo, Support and Solutions Technical Manager comments, “It’s great to see so many members of our team successfully complete their apprenticeships and grow their careers with Daxtra. Through the apprenticeship scheme, we’ve managed to acquire talent that has helped our business grow. We’ve also been able to help our apprentices improve their skills and gain first-hand experience working for a leading software company.”
Our Apprenticeship Scheme
As a business, we’ve experienced many benefits of recruiting apprentices, including:
- A straightforward and streamlined hiring process through our apprenticeship provider
- The chance to shape the training and education of our apprentices to fit our business and way of working
- The chance to give young talent a solid career path and opportunities to learn as they work, earn money, and achieve qualifications
Our chosen apprenticeships partner QA Apprenticeships specialise in finding young people who are keen to work in IT and technology. Craig MacFarlane, Daxtra’s Account Manager at QA, comments, “We have been working with Daxtra for four years now and have found some fantastic young talent to join as apprentices.”
“The apprentices have really thrived in the supportive environment. The modern apprenticeship scheme has given them opportunities to upskill them within their role and has led to some of the apprentices already being promoted within the company.”
“Our main aim is to help young people at the start of their career to find roles they can build a career in and we have certainly seen that working with Daxtra.”
As Ross Eaton advises: "I think you should definitely consider an apprenticeship over university. Some people go into university without thinking about how they can get experience in a job. I'm now 3-4 years into my career, and some of those people are just graduating."
We look forward to welcoming more apprentices to the Daxtra team in the future! Find out more about QA's apprenticeship scheme here.
