An Apprenticeship at JMS - a vocational window on the engineering world

A Higher Level Apprenticeship with JMS

It’s easy to criticise the education system and rare to praise it. When it meets the right student and the two click, it is well worth taking your hat off to the joint success. And when that student finds a work placement that grows into an apprenticeship four years later in a business as progressive as JMS Engineers, the story becomes a blueprint for mutual achievement.

Megan has just started a Higher Level Apprenticeship with JMS Engineers at their Midlands office and this is her story.

Megan found JMS when she was just 14

The first tick in the box came when Megan attended the Midlands Studio College in Hinckley. The school’s ‘work ready’ educational policy certainly didn’t work for every pupil but it opened vocational doors for Megan. The studio ran a 9 to 5 study programme with one day a week in work experience.

Megan found JMS when she was 14 and started working with the Structural Engineering team every Friday. In two years she gained an impressive collection of GCSEs and went on to King Henry VI Sixth Form College to study Biology, Chemistry and Geography – a scientist in her head and heart.

 Megan runs through project notes with Bhavin Parmar

Although it wasn’t formal in the true sense of the word, she and JMS arranged it so that Megan continued to work part time as a Structural Engineering CAD Technician. 


Give and take

Like many STEM students (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Megan's CAD experience from school enabled a swift progression to Auto CAD during her productive hours at JMS.

The team structured time to introduce Megan to all areas of Structural Design and the technical build concepts that furnish JMS with the experience and skills to engineer the solutions that make a construction project deliverable safely, within cost and on time.

Two years and 3 A levels later and the next lifestyle model suggests that University is the next step – or is it. Science had been her passion and academic strength so such a degree would surely be the natural progression. But when JMS offered a formal apprenticeship scheme, another vocational door opened.

Structural and Civil Engineering is a science that literally shapes the world. Civil Engineering is responsible for planning, designing and building society’s essential infrastructure, taking a leading role in maintaining the quality of our personal and professional lives.

 The combination of college tutorial and vocational application is inspiring

Not surprisingly, Megan accepted the position, now an apprentice within the Civil Engineering team and about to start a Level 5 HND in ‘Construction and the Built Environment’ at Leicester College.

Her apprenticeship will take her through all departments, all specialities and all of the regional JMS offices and prepare her for a Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering in two years. 

Megan Nicholson is not the first and most certainly will not be the last apprentice to benefit from JMS’s progressive approach to developing skills within the engineering community and within JMS itself.

Great story Megan – thank you.

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