Pendennis Apprentice Community Week 2025

Pendennis celebrates National Apprenticeship Week every year, and this year we've seen employers, training providers, schools and students embrace how apprenticeships provide skills for life. Since 1998, our apprenticeship offering has become a key part of who we are as a company, having now trained over 375 young men and women in the boat industry over the past 27 years. Many of our apprentices have progressed to senior positions within the company such as project engineers, trade, and project managers.

During National Apprenticeship Week, our apprentices volunteer their time and skills to local charities and organisations in a week we affectionately refer to as "Pendennis Apprentice Community Week". Our apprentices get the chance to work on key skills, such as project management and project coordination as well as communicating with external contacts and with colleagues from different trades. Not only does Pendennis Apprentice Community Week boost the apprentices' skills, it provides a sense of fulfilment by helping out several worthy causes in our local community. Our apprentices tell us year after year how the experience improves their confidence and inter-personal skills and as a company, we are happy to be providing a well-deserved boost to community projects.

This year, our apprentices volunteered at several local community projects including: Falmouth Cricket Club, the Children’s Sailing Trust, Age UK, BF Adventure, at Falmouth's Community Youth Football Club fields and Source FM.

At Falmouth Cricket Club, the team built a new frame for the clubs bowling nets ahead of the season, they also helped with general maintenance work. 

The Children's Sailing Trust is a local charity that aims to provide opportunity for young people to experience the transformative effects of being on the water. Here the apprentices fitted out storage containers to help better organise the space. 

At Age UK, work included painting indoors and cleaning up the garden area to freshen up the space and provide a more welcoming environment for visitors.

At BF Adventure, apprentice lead Ben provided us with a summary of their work: 

"We spent our week with BF Adventure, which is a centre known for its outdoor activities and team-building experiences, offering schools and young groups an opportunity to stay in bunk style cabins surrounded by nature whilst partaking in outdoor activities. BF Adventure were very grateful for our help to get all of the following jobs completed in time for their first school group to come this year.

To ensure these rooms stay functional and inviting we spent the week freshening up their 6 cabins with some emulsion paint. The application of emulsion paint is a quick and cost-effective way to refresh the interiors. Having these cabins refreshed ensures that groups have a clean place to stay and leave with positive memories of their time spent at BF Adventure.

Our other main job was strimming the grass and weeds around the fronts of the cabins and cutting overgrown hedges. By doing this the outdoor spaces are kept neat and tidy for guests and will help in the future with accessing the outside for routine maintenance on the cabins.

To finish off our week we helped with some smaller jobs such as assembling and installing new heaters into the cabins and we gave the cabins a hoover and clean up to make sure we left them cleaner than we found them.

We had a mixture of 2nd, 3rd and 4th year apprentices who are all learning a range of trades within Pendennis’ apprenticeship scheme. Having some team leads from the Paint team was useful to be able to guide the teams with some tips to get a good finish throughout the cabins."

Alan, Maintenance Coordinator at BF Adventure commented "They were a great group, worked hard and I am really pleased with the results!".

At Falmouth's Community Youth Football Club fields, the apprentices assembled and put up two new football dugouts, which will offer a protected environment for players and coaching staff during matches. The apprentices also put up new sets of goals posts and fitted a solar panelled light. 

For local radio station Source FM, our apprentices designed and crafted from scratch a wheelchair-friendly sound and recording desk. Our joinery apprentices laminated up the plywood, which was then cut on Pendennis’ in-house CNC Machine. Engineering apprentices then used their expertise to weld the base together. As a team they then assembled the units, applied the edging veneers, and joined it all together. S.J.Andrews supplied the steel free of charge and Kernick Metal Finishers are powder coating the metal frame for the base free of charge too. The completion of this new recording desk means that Source FM will be ready to start broadcasting from their new Kimberly Park base in Falmouth.

In addition, our South West Apprentice Ambassador - 2nd year apprentice Lewis Verran, visited each location during National Apprenticeship Week and documented his colleagues progress by taking photos. Lewis did an excellent job at getting involved and flying the SWAAN flag.

As well as helping with community work, our apprentices attended local events such as the Apprentice Games at Cornwall College. The Apprentice Games is Cornwall College's annual fun-filled event where apprentices from across the county compete in several rounds of challenges to test all kinds of skills. This year activities included climbing, hair dressing and navigating their way through an assault course. The Pendennis apprentices achieved a credible 3rd place Bronze medal, competing against 14 other teams. 

Pendennis are happy to announce that we have been shortlisted as finalists for The Apprenticeship and Training Awards 2025. The awards celebrate the exceptional achievements of employers and training providers across the UK and the awards ceremony will take place in March 2025 in Liverpool.

Recruitment for this year’s intake of Pendennis Apprentices was announced during the week; our Apprentice Recruitment Open Evening at our shipyard will be taking place on Tuesday 4th March. Anyone interested in pursuing a Pendennis Apprenticeship should attend the Open Evening. You can register to attend the Open Evening by visiting the apprenticeships page of our website. 

Application packs for the apprentice scheme will be available on the night. After the recruitment evening, application packs will be available to download on the apprenticeships page of our website.