The scheme has been introduced by Spitfire to nurture future talent and to address a growing skills shortage experienced by the company. The specialised nature of Spitfire’s service has created the necessity to train graduates from scratch which is overseen by highly skilled and experienced members of Spitfire.
Despite the recent recession the company has found recruiting the right calibre staff challenging. In the past Spitfire has recruited as far away as Australia but changes in the law has made this more difficult.
Susie Ward, Spitfire’s Marketing & HR Director comments, “As Spitfire has grown into a leading provider of business network services it has become increasingly important to attract and retain high-calibre employees to meet the needs of our growing customer base. Our services are now based around connectivity solutions which require a particular skill set. To ensure we have suitably qualified employees we have begun to train our own sales, engineering and technical support people. This represents a major financial investment and a big commitment in staff mentoring time. But ultimately we feel it’s worth it for the better outcomes achieved in terms of staff loyalty and learning the Spitfire way of doing things, to ensure that we continue to deliver the highest levels of customer service in all areas that our clients have come to expect.”