Profile: Gas Engineering

More and more students are leaving school and deciding against the university route. A foolish move? Not necessarily  - as the British Gas Engineering Academy is setting out to prove. In fact, one of the most surprising things about the Academy is that you could be earning the same kind of salary at 19 - without any debt we might add - as a 21-year old graduate does.

Hold that thought for a moment. Gas Engineering? Isn’t that for bulky men with even bulkier tool bags?

“Not at all!” laughs Jenny Poole, one of the recently-qualified apprentices. “People still look twice when I turn up, because – how can I put it? – when someone calls for a gas appliance engineer, they expect a bloke to turn up. They quickly get used to me though, especially when they see me get to work sorting out their boiler, radiator or whatever.”

And it’s certainly not all tool bags. For a start, a lot of what you do requires a bit of coordination, rather than brute strength. And you’re just as likely to be using a laptop as you are a box of tools.

Of course, you don’t go straight into fixing people’s boilers and so on. First you go through training – some of the best around, in fact. British Gas sets the industry standards (pretty much worldwide in some cases), choosing to use their own instructors to hone the skills of each apprentice and investing huge amounts on each individual throughout their training. A lot of the training uses simulated houses, so you could find yourself walking into life-size kitchens, getting up into lofts or ripping up floorboards as practice.

Jenny explains: “The first year of the Academy involved pretty intense college work where you learn more technical skills and techniques than you ever thought possible. At the end of it, you take your Corgi exams and they are hard work. But it’s definitely worth it. You really can’t beat the buzz of turning up at someone’s house and fixing a problem that’s really stressing them out.”

Once qualified, of course, you’ll have a trade behind you for the rest of their life, and a possible route to the top in one of the country’s biggest companies. In the words of one of the apprentices, you can ‘set yourself up for life’…