East Midlands Railway (EMR) has launched a drive to recruit people to join its apprenticeship scheme for Train Drivers.
Successful apprentices will be based at East Midlands Railway depots at Nottingham and Derby. The railway has recently received an official Ofsted rating of ‘Good’ for their Apprenticeship scheme, and is looking for candidates from all backgrounds to apply for the roles. In particular, the railway welcomes applications from women, younger people, and ethnic minority groups as it values diversity and is committed to ensuring equality across its organisation.
To apply for the apprenticeship scheme, applicants must be aged 21 and above. During their training, apprentices will undergo a 12-18-month programme that combines theory and practical work in the classroom with developing their practical skills including cab rides and signal box visits.
East Midlands Railway’s training academy has world-class facilities, where apprentices’ classroom learning is supported by state-of-the-art Virtual Reality that replicates real-life railway situations. As part of their training to become train drivers, apprentices will have access to a cab simulator which allows them to learn in a safe environment about driving trains in a variety of different circumstances and conditions.
Tips and useful information about applying to be a Train Driver are available online at https://www.traindriveracademy.com/ and information about the apprenticeships can be found here
The closing date for applicants is Sunday, 22nd January 2023.
Kate Holden, HR Director for East Midlands Railway, said: “At EMR, we currently employ just over 600 drivers and to fulfill our fleet rollout, we need drivers to operate the trains across the network.
“One of our major challenges is encouraging a more diverse driving workforce. We’ve been working to increase the number of females applying for our driver roles, with open evenings aimed specifically at women, as well as tackling the unconscious bias through blind screening.
“We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and ages and we’d urge anybody interested in a career in any of these driver roles to check out our website.”
Responses
According to EMR they are looking for ‘women, younger people, and ethnic minority groups’ so basically the the following criteria need to apply 35+ white male – even though you may be the ideal candidate
What’s the point of posting comments on here if you are not going to approve ?
Hi Patrick,
Although we use a number of anti-spam technologies to stop thousands of spam comments each year, we still manually approve comments before publication and this can take up to 24 hours
I think you’ll find that looking to high applicants using your chosen prefered criteria based on people’s skin tone age and gender, is illegal and you are breaking the Law, just like if your preferences had been only looking to employ young white males.
I can see that you have honourable intentions and looking to tick as many politically correct boxes as possible.
A possible outcome of your ill inspired recruitment campaign is that eventually you won’t have enough drivers to drive your trains, so adding to more trains and services being cancelled, because you are only looking to employ only a smaller section of society, so therefore will ultimately get a lot less drivers in a much longer period of time.
There is no point, I posted a comment on the RMT, I just wondered if the they sponsored rail advent, needless to say it was removed.
Hi Kevin,
I cannot find any comments we have removed, they can take 24-48 hours to be approved if they are held by the system for moderation.
To see all your comments, you can click on the ‘My Content’ icon just to the right of the text which says how many comments have been left on any article. If you need any help, just get in touch