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Our Young Talent Programme wins a prestigious award

Thatchers Cider has won the prestigious IGD Award for Employability.

At an event earlier this week, nearly 600 colleagues from the food and grocery industry across the UK, gathered at the IGD Awards to raise a toast to the industry’s achievements over the last 12 months.

We received this accolade for our Young Talent Programme, which addresses employers’ challenges in finding skilled, capable team members. With the Young Talent Programme, which is in its first full year and has just seen 17 apprentices and graduates start work us, we are delivering high-quality, inspirational work experience and development opportunities, preparing people to work in this world-class drinks industry.

Martin Thatcher says, “It is a real honour to be recognised by IGD with this award for our Young Talent Programme. Over recent years we have found that knowledge about careers within the food and drink sector hasn’t met our needs as an emerging business, so we wanted to create our own apprenticeship programme to attract the best people and invest in training and development.”

Emma Cox, training coordinator at Thatchers adds, “We started from a blank sheet of paper, and in just twelve months by working with local schools, colleges and universities we have developed and compiled an apprenticeship and graduate programme that is tailored to the needs of our industry, not only helping young people start on their career path, but importantly developing the skilled workforce that as a growing company we need at Thatchers.”

Fiona Miller, Head of Employability and Skills at IGD, said: “Already reaching over 10,000 young people, we were blown away by the results Thatchers is achieving after just 12 months of its Young Talent programme. The Thatchers team has a strong understanding of the education landscape and has developed a long-term strategy and comprehensive programme that puts the needs of young people at its heart. They run engaging activities for school and university students, and work collaboratively with teachers and parents, to empower young people to make informed decisions about their future. It’s great to see that the young talent pipeline is already building as a result, and that they work closely with other business in the region to share best practice.”

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