The Apprentice Challenge

Wednesday 18 April 2018

To celebrate Scottish Apprenticeship Week (5-9 March 2018) – a Skills Development Scotland initiative, we teamed up with Estates to run a television’s Apprentice-style challenge aimed at raising awareness of the success and benefits of running such schemes.

Helen Mackie and Pauline Brown (in the Alan Sugar masks), with the Estates and IT Services challenge participants and their supervisors

The event aimed to test the apprentices initiative, planning, team work, communication and negotiation skills. Above all of that, it was meant to be good fun and to acknowledge how important apprenticeship programmes are.

Apprentices taking a photo on the Swilken Bridge – they had to be wearing something tartan or that had a saltire…

Fifteen apprentices took part from Estates and IT Services and competed in five teams of three to carry out a range of tasks around St Andrews, from tracking down the University’s famous maces, to scoring basketball hoops at the Sports Centre. Other challenges included having to find a specific book in the University’s library, taking a group selfie on the Swilken Bridge wearing tartan (or a saltire)  and making a 60-second film of their team.

In the afternoon, the participants attended the ‘Boardroom Event’ – as featured in the television programme – to face the judges and get the verdict on their efforts. Points were awarded depending on how well the task was fulfilled as well as for ingenuity and creativity shown by the competitors.

The winning team of Jake (IT), Callum & Liam (Estates) were then awarded £150 of Amazon vouchers to share, donated by QA Apprenticeships.

More photos and video footage from the event can be found below:

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