 The apprentices are a pivotal part of the technical services team. I can't imagine life without them at WMJ. They're involved in everything that we do. And there's always an apprentice shadowing a member of my team. I think becoming an apprentice is a great route. I'm Emma and I'm a third year apprentice at WMJ. We have a 3D simulator where we work on developing autonomous vehicles or intelligent vehicles. It's a Faraday cage which has 360 degrees projector screen and we can put vehicle in. We're doing a lot of testing, trying to make vehicles autonomous. Physics forms a big part of my role. We work a lot with electromagnetic waves and look at the effect it has on autonomous vehicles. For us in the School of Physics and Astronomy we gain great benefit from apprentices. We ourselves get exposure to new levels of thinking and also more importantly we get financial support to send our apprentices a way to study whether that be up to degree level. I decided to become an apprentice after my mother highlighted the opportunity to me and it's the best thing I've ever done. Liquid helium is the lifeblood of low temperature physics and medical research and without me they wouldn't have the reliability of obtaining liquid helium whenever they needed it. Our plans for the future would be to eventually become senior cryogenics technician for this facility. I definitely recommend other businesses to take on apprentices. I think we've had an incredibly positive experience within the School of all of our apprentices. When people ask me how their apprenticeship is or would I recommend it is Leonardo specifically allows you to every three months move around different functions within the company. I obviously joined the company not really knowing what sort of area of engineering I wanted to specialise in so this was so beneficial for me. An area that really inspired me was optics and being able to work with optics doing optical bonding so that's what really drove me to want to do that from a final placement and that'll be the job that I'll then finish my apprenticeship with. Simtechnical was testing as a medium-sized business. We brought our apprentice in and it's added amazing value to us. It's certainly not just for big businesses. They're capturing elements of the business that we've not actually looked at before and trying to progress and look at new ideas and where we can take things so it's helped us a lot. Technical skills are a vital part of what Simtech does. Having an apprentice with those skills helps me to assign the right person to the right job. I wanted to become an apprentice because I saw it as a good opportunity to gain hands-on work experience alongside fully qualified technicians. I'll go out on site, I'll take samples of construction materials, I'll come back into the laboratory and test those samples of things such as air voids. So I've always loved science growing up, especially physics and physics is heavily involved in my workplace. We have to separate the samples that we've taken out on site into different elements. At the end of my apprenticeship I hope to save in Simtech, continue learning and gaining more experience and work my way up within the company. I would definitely recommend employing an apprentice. It's brought enthusiasm to the business and for us it's really helped our business grow.