Bringing together business, education and students

Weather Shop is a young business and well known locally because of its uniqueness. What many possibly don't realise is that it is an e-commerce business serving 10's of thousands of customers each year. Weather Shop has also developed a large commercial and educational customer base and now has a seperate busines, EnviroMonitors, dedicated to the agricultural and horticultural markets. Since it started the company has been involved with various EBP projects and especially EYR. Some years ago the directors commited to taking on an apprentice when the time was right.

Despite the recession that time arrived in 2008. However finding a candidate and a course was not an easy task. We approached Sussex Careers who had a provider contact us but after one visit we heard no more despite much chasing. Eventually we realised that they weren't able to come up with the course / candidate to meet our needs. Eventually we decided on a different approach - we would find the a candidate and so long as they worked out we would work with them to identfy an appropriate course.

Using a simple advert at the college through VT we soon met with and employed Matthew. Although the latter period of secondary education had not worked for him we saw something in him that we believed would work for both of us. The deal we struck with him was that he would start work with us, straight away in October, and, so long as we felt that he was the right material and capable of and willing to apply himself, then we would work with him to find and agree upon an apprenticeship.

By the beginning of 2009 we were all more than satisfied by Matt's commitment at which point Tim Sorensen put us in touch with Campus Training. With their consultant and Matt we have devised a series of courses that will take Matt 3-5 years to complete and will give him an excellent basis to work with our, or indeed anyone else's, customers.

You can read Matt's interpretation elsewhere on the site.