hi we are currently looking at employing an apprentice, just looking for some feedback in terms of what type of wage should we be looking to pay etc and are there any grants available to help towards there college fees etc? any info much appreciated.

It will be a 16year old school leaver, hopefully so we can mould him into the type of engineer we want ( a cross between electrician/fire alarm engineer) because most of our work is electrical or fire it makes recruiting people hard because there arent many electricians with fire alarm experiance and there are not many fire alarm engineers with the relevent qualifications to do electrical work and although we could employ horses for courses so to speak it makes the issue of call outs a pain because as a small company it wouldnt be viable for us to have more than one person on standby at a time so we have decided to start bringing people through the ranks.

and hopefully they will be with us for years to come!

Contact the training agencies local to you, im sure they will be in the phone book.

Up here its Access Training, they have people who want to be involved in the industry and have what they class as suitable qualifications.