February 10 2021

Phil Harris, Operations Manager at Rosso, celebrates Transdev’s apprentices and offers insight into the variety of apprenticeship schemes his colleagues are enrolled on.

Here at Transdev we have 19 colleagues across the company enrolled on apprenticeships, in all levels of the business and across our nine depots over the North. In my small corner of the company in Rochdale, there’s three of us - me, Lee and Alex.

I’m the Operations Manager at Rosso and have worked here for 9 years, initially as a driving examiner. Now I’m looking after the day-to-day operations myself and feel proud of how I’ve come to be in this position.

Offered the chance to do a Level 3 apprenticeship in HR, I’ve jumped at it. It fits with my role and I’m grateful for the opportunity to progress and keep learning. I hope that through the qualification I can learn to help my colleagues quicker, be more confident to deal with new scenarios myself, and have a positive impact on the team around me.

Our Service Delivery Manager Lee Wardle is one of the up and coming stars in the company – winner of our Rising Star award at our company Amazing Awards in 2020 – and works hard to support me and the rest of our team here.

Lee is on our StepUp talent and development programme and is taking on his apprenticeship in Leadership and Management alongside that. StepUp is a platform for some of the most promising people here at Transdev to move into new roles and reach their potential, and it’s through the programme that Lee took the step from Duty Manager to Service Delivery Manager.

I know he’s working hard on it and pushing himself to achieve more, which is setting an amazing example to others in our team, particularly our young colleagues.

Perhaps more traditionally, we’ve got an engineering apprenticeship here too – Alex Cottam. Alex is exactly the sort of person you want to be coming into your team. He’s enthusiastic and passionate about his work and is a very well-regarded member of our engineering team, on his way to being a top-class mechanic. His apprenticeship is supporting him to combine his studies with work, whilst making a significant contribution to what we do here.

In National Apprenticeship Week we’re highlighting the 19 colleagues across the company, all with similar stories to mine, Lee’s and Alex’s. And we’re not only growing individually, but as a team – with three new apprentice engineers set to join us this year.