Back in November 2013 Gareth Coddington joined EN:Able Futures to do a Level 3 apprenticeship in Construction & the Built Environment while hosted by global construction and property consultancy RLB.
After completing his apprenticeship with EN:Able Futures in 2015 Gareth remained working at RLB, fast forward eight years and he is now a Cost Manager and a fully qualified Quantity Surveyor.
Matt Summerhill, Managing Partner for Yorkshire & Humber at RLB, said: “When Gareth joined us I headed up the cost management team so it’s been great to see Gareth’s progression first hand, not just professionally, but as an individual.
“To see Gareth come from being an apprentice, then a university student and now a chartership has been a great thing for us as a business. When Gareth joined us back in 2013 it was a dip of the toe in the water for RLB. At the time we hadn’t had apprentices for quite a while, probably since I had done mine. So the option of taking on apprentices through EN:Able Futures gave us the a bit of security we needed as a business to trial it.
“After the two years working with EN:Able Futures we’d got to know Gareth well, he’d done great work with us and it was then no risk for us to take on Gareth on as a full-time RLB employee and support him through his degree apprenticeship.”
Reflecting on the past eight years Gareth said: “My journey from Apprentice to Chartered Quantity Surveyor has been a long but rewarding process in which RLB have supported me throughout. I have gained some invaluable experience which has enabled me to develop on a technical level and a personal level.
“I think apprenticeships are a very good way to start a career because you get to study and do the on-the-job learning. It’s the best of both worlds. I found that at university the stuff they were teaching the full-time students I had already done at work, so I was ahead of them in many ways and found it quite a lot easier.”
Alongside doing his Chartership, working during the pandemic has also been a unique challenge with one of his responsibilities being to make DWP premises Covid19 safe, he said: “We were key workers, so we were working all the way through the pandemic to ensure that employees and visitors were kept safe. We also worked with the Intensive Care Unit at Leicester, putting measures in place to protect people.”
Becoming a Charted Quantity Surveyor is no mean feat, and Gareth couldn’t have succeeded without the support RLB gave him, Gareth said: “My highlight of working so far has been becoming Charted and seeing all my hard work paid off. I got a lot of support from RLB to help me prepare for the assessment, I did lots of mock interviews because there are lots of questions you need to prepare for, and the actual assessment interview is an hour long with a presentation. Since becoming qualified I’ve now started helping other apprentices prepare for their charterships. It takes a lot of effort to do a mock interview, you must read through all the documents, prepare questions on it then do the hour-long interview. Lots of people gave up lots of time to help me with that, so now it my turn to help others, especially while it’s still so fresh in my mind.”
Looking forward at his career Gareth said: “I’m going to continue working with the RLB and progress as far as I can. I have worked on a variety of projects in many different sectors which has given me some great experience to utilise in the future. The mix of working whilst learning has definitely been a benefit and I would recommend the apprenticeship route to any future professionals.”