Dovecote Park (2024)

In the relatively short time it has been running, Dovecote Park’s apprenticeship programme has received considerable recognition. It was commended in the 2018 Princess Royal Training Awards, delivered by City & Guilds, where judges said it was creating an “impressive talent pipeline” and applauded its commitment and investment in the long-term skills development of their staff”. The awards panel also praised its work with female apprentices and for challenging the ‘norms’ in fields such as butchery.

Dovecote Park Managing Director, Andrew McAllister, described the development of the butchery apprenticeship programme as central to the organisation’s success and added that the long-term planning, overall training structure and employee development ethos in all areas of the business also helped to clinch this award.

East Riding College crowned the company Training Champion in its 2017 internal awards and again in 2019, highlighting its social commitment to young people by supporting them outside of the working day and offering them the opportunity to earn additional in-house and external qualifications.

Dovecote Park is also using the levy to recruit and train apprentices in a number of other areas, including engineering, maintenance, mechanical, electrical and warehouse trades. These are for shop floor roles such as maintaining vital machinery and equipment. The company also makes use of leading manufacturing technology to ensure the highest quality product, made with maximum efficiency.

It has also used the apprenticeship programme to invest in existing staff in team leading, management and business improvement qualifications.

In total, Dovecote employs around 700 people across two locations: at the original site in North Yorkshire and Skellingthorpe in Lincolnshire. While its main site has an idyllic location between the villages of Stapleton and Darrington, it isn’t well connected by public transport and this can bring its own recruitment challenges, says McKnight. “It’s a very rural location with no/not many buses so travelling to work is a big thing,” he explains, adding that being able to offer attractive, on-site training programmes is helping to address this challenge in areas such as engineering where it faces tough competition for potential talent.

To increase its recruitment reach, and ultimately broaden its talent pool, it holds open days and attends recruitment fairs where it markets its apprenticeship offering.

Dovecote Park looks for a keenness and willingness to learn as prerequisites for potential apprenticeships. “It is good if they know a bit about the business but as long as they are keen, we can train them,” says McKnight. “One of the employees from our first cohort has dyslexia and Asperger’s syndrome and has turned out to be one of our best butchers.”

Dovecote Park has put in place a rigorous review process every month which helps to keep apprentices on track and guides them in areas they might need to work on.

Dealing with the 20%-off-the-job training element potentially brings challenges to any business but McKnight says it is all about getting managers on board and then “sticking to the plan”: “If you commit to an apprenticeship programme and then find out managers can’t release staff, it leads to problems so you have to get their buy-in and ensure they understand the implications of it and organise back-up.”

McKnight cannot deny that the apprenticeship levy has increased his workload as training manager but its benefits to the business far outweigh this. “You’ve also got to get your head around how you best use a large amount of finance,” he says, urging those training professionals yet to use the levy to quickly recognise its value. “It means you don’t have to go cap in hand to ask for funding that might not be there. Those that haven’t yet used the levy also need to quickly recognise that as well as being a great way to put in place a channel for new talent, it also helps you to upskill the existing workforce.”

Dovecote Park (2024)
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