For over 37 years, George F White has provided expert land, property and business consultancy to clients across the North. While our roots are firmly in the rural sector, as the business has grown, we’ve expanded and diversified, offering service across agriculture, commercial, development, energy, environmental, investment and residential.
Apprenticeships have been a key factor in growing our agency teams, who work directly with our residential and commercial clients. As the business grew, we turned to apprenticeships as a means of expanding our workforce and bringing new people into the business.
When it came to expanding the agency teams, our decision to introduce apprentices was influenced by two factors: opportunity and experience. By working with apprentices we realised that not only could we create opportunities for young people, we could also mould them around the business.
Rather than a shortcoming, their lack of experience meant they also lacked bad habits acquired from other agencies. By beginning their career at George F White, our apprentices were able to live and breathe our culture, and grow with the business.
Over the years, we’ve had great successes with our apprentices and one of our most recent graduates Adam (see image above) was named Apprentice of the Year 2015 in the Newcastle Business Awards. Having joined GFW Letting team in 2014, Adam received the award for his professional success and continued hard work. As an individual, Adam’s achievements are testament to how important it is to invest in our people and the opportunities that apprenticeships can afford to young people.
Working with apprentices requires investment not just from the individual but from the business to support them and to help them grow. Importantly for us, we’ve retained every one of our apprentices, who have either grown into positions within the business, or have had roles created for them.
Predominantly these roles have been in agency and administrative positions, and as we continue to work with apprentices, it would be great to introduce more young people to different areas of the business as opportunities arise.
