MITIE crowns the 'real apprentice' 2009

MITIE has awarded the title of the Real Apprentice 2009 to joint winners Gary Cupid and Abdul Razak.
The ceremony was held at Morgan Stanley’s offices in Canary Wharf and was well attended by over 100 guests including MITIE’s managers and clients, members of ELBA (East London Business Alliance), past apprentices and other corporate responsibility professionals. The award was handed out by chief executive of ELBA, Liam Kane and MITIE’s HR director, Joanne Bacon.
The Real Apprentice is a best practice employer-led training programme run in conjunction with ELBA. It is currently open to everyone between the ages of 17-25 and takes away the barriers to employment faced by young people from disadvantaged areas in East London.
The apprentices are each given two weeks pre-placement training followed by 10 weeks work experience on one of MITIE’s contracts.
This could be learning about reprographics at PricewaterhouseCoopers, or getting to grips with the latest bird control techniques with MITIE’s pest control business.
The winners were chosen from the 30 successful candidates who successfully completed the 12 week training course on MITIE’s London contracts and it was decided to give the award to joint winners this year after two individuals stood out from the rest:
One of the winners, Gary Cupid from Hackney, had just finished a media production degree at university and was unable to find a job when he learnt about the Real Apprentice scheme. After applying to the scheme through his local job centre, he was assigned to MITIE’s contract at Landflex working for the facilities management team. From day one Cupid was eager to prove his worth and value to the organisation and set his own personal bar high to ensure that he reached his own and MITIE’s objectives. He is now working full-time for MITIE as a facilities assistant on the Landflex contract.
The other joint winner was Abdul Razak from Tower Hamlets. Razak was previously working in retail and after signing up to the Real Apprentice scheme was placed at MITIE’s office in the Docklands.
Razak was chosen as a winner as he was always upbeat, friendly and a complete joy to have in the team. He supported his management team with great efficiency and accuracy and they felt that they could completely rely on him due to his professionalism in the job. In fact they thought that Razak was so good that he is now working full-time for MITIE as an operations administrator in the Docklands.
Gary Cupid said: “For Raz and I to have won the Real Apprentice is a fantastic achievement. After 12 weeks working at MITIE, I have come such a long way and now have a career and a good idea of what I want to do in life. I am so grateful to MITIE and ELBA to have given me the chance to learn new skills and apply them in a business environment.”
Jane James, employment regeneration director at MITIE, said: “We had such a high calibre of apprentices this year, it was always going to be difficult to pick the winner but Gary and Abdul really shone through and both performed beyond all expectations. We are very proud of what they and all the apprentices have achieved. With unemployment on the rise schemes like the Real Apprentice are now more important than ever and I would encourage every company to adopt similar schemes top help in the regeneration of East London.”
www.mitie.co.uk