Renfrew engineering company Doosan Babcock has trained over 400 full time apprentices since 2009 and is planning to hire another 500 over the next five years.

The residential apprenticeship course will see the new recruits, aged 16 to 18, travel to power plants right across the UK, preparing them well for the itinerant project work of the energy sector.

This year the Renfrew site will welcome 14 apprentices in total, most of whom are residents of Renfrewshire and a further 65 apprentices at other sites across the UK. Sam Thompson, a former Doosan Babcock apprentice, said: “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I left school but I definitely knew I didn’t want to end up in a part-time, uninteresting job. The Doosan Babcock apprenticeship scheme really opened my eyes to the opportunities that are available if you are willing to try new things.

“I now work full time at Doosan Babcock and they are putting me through a Mechanical Engineering degree. It’s a shame that so many young people feel that it is almost mandatory to go to university straight from school rather than heading into work and learning tangible skills that make you very employable.” This training will help equip young people with important, high-demand engineering skills, setting them up for exciting careers across the nuclear, thermal, oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.

Doosan Babcock has recently invested £4.5 million into the launch of the new Process Engineering Centre at their Renfrew site which will create nearly 400 jobs across the UK by 2018. Over 250 of these roles are set to be based in Renfrewshire.