YORK College students have been sharing their successes stories during National Apprenticeship Week (NAW) 2024.
NAW is a week-long event dedicated to spotlighting the winning partnerships between business and apprentices.
Dan Hogben, from Barmby Moor in York, turned to York College for an apprenticeship after events prevented him from following his dreams. At 16-years-old, Dan was diagnosed with kidney disease and found out one of his kidneys was only 13 per cent functional.
At the time, Dan was an academy footballer for Hull City FC - a team that he was on course to land a scholarship for.
In 2022, Dan had a kidney transplant. He was in the second year of his A-levels and had to halt his studies.
Dan recovered from the surgery and chose to move on from A-levels. He then began York College's T-level in design, surveying and planning, which requires 350 hours of placement work.
Dan impressed his placement employers Caddick Construction so much that he was interviewed for a site engineering degree apprenticeship with the property developer group, which would give him the opportunity to get a degree-level qualification.
Dan said: "I was hoping that I was going to have a career in football with Hull City but, even without the transplant, I always knew that statistically only something like one per cent of academy footballers have a professional career in the game.
"I had my kidney transplant when I was meant to be doing my A-levels, so I could have gone back to school and done an extra year, but I went back for a day and decided it wasn’t for me.
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"I was always interested in engineering at school and construction is also such a good industry to get into, so it seemed an ideal way of putting the two together."
Elsewhere, 40-year-old Izabela Bogusiewicz came to the UK from Poland, where she had an equivalent masters degree-level education, and was employed at a senior management level.
Izabela had to sit her maths and English GCSE exams at York College, when she moved to the United Kingdom.
She got a job as an administrator for the homeless charity, SASH, where she is able to get paid whilst working towards further qualifications.
Izabela's efforts at work and on campus won her the apprentice contribution to college life/community prize, at last year's REACH awards.
She said: "I asked for finance to be included in my new job title and I’m now being trained to do Sage and accounting to learn the basics so it will prepare me to go on a proper accounting course to build my future career.
"The apprenticeship has opened many doors for me and allowed me to develop in different ways."
Beauty therapist Ffion Powell came to York College as a self described "very shy 14-year-old Saturday Girl". Now 28, Ffion has 250 regular clients who visit her Totally Polished salon on Tadcaster’s High Street.
She also hires out stations to seven other self-employed therapists, including her first boss Diane Taylor, who worked with the college to oversee Ffion’s beauty therapist apprenticeship 10 years ago.
Ffion said: "My mum had to pretty much push me through the door, because she thought it was time that I had a job.
“At college, you learn the core things you need like communication and people skills.
"We learned the basics of how to carry out a treatment from start to finish and the tutors have backgrounds in the industry, so they pass on all their tips and tricks."
National apprenticeship week ended on February 11.
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