By Vodafone

Vodafone’s new Centre of Excellence focuses on providing a better place to work for their engineers, incorporating wellbeing, safety, training, mentoring and outreach.

They’ve heard how their engineering teams want to upskill, diversify their experience on customer accounts and develop their technical career pathways. They have senior engineers with 30 years’ experience of network engineering wanting to pass their knowledge to their new apprentices and the workforce of the future.

They listened to their people and created their new Managed Engineering Services (MES) Centre of Excellence. This has been designed as a hub for their engineers initially, offering the following services:

Meeting room and training space for their new Virtual lab training sessions – a space dedicated for their Virtual lab, in partnership with their supplier WWT. This training enables them to be ahead of the game with new demand requests, upskill their engineers to enable a flexible operating model and help engineers progress through technical career pathways and apprenticeship schemes.

Engineer staging and storage – an area dedicated to their engineers, where they can also then test equipment in the Tech lab prior to setting up on customer accounts. This area provides the perfect space to demonstrate a ‘day in the life’ of an engineer to new apprentices.

PPE (personal protective equipment) ‘try before you order’ station – a dedicated space housing their new ordering portal and recycling scheme, 3M ear-fit validation testing (to put their engineers’ wellbeing as a priority), and their first women’s PPE / maternity PPE and modesty tunics to demonstrate they are inclusive and to attract female engineers.

A new Technical Lab – where their senior engineers have been busy creating training courses in house for their apprentices. The space also provides an opportunity for existing engineers to upskill and test equipment.

Outreach events – the space offers a unique opportunity to showcase some of the fabulous initiatives they are involved in, and those they have plans for in the near future. They will evolve the Centre of Excellence from engineering to include Customer Insight workshops and innovation. Vodafone partnered with Womens’ Engineering Society (WES) in May last year and hosted guest speaker talks from WES at their launch event. They also launched an Inspiring the Futures volunteer uptake, as Vodafone offer a generous 5 volunteer days per year, which gives them a perfect opportunity to attract new talent.

Their opening event for the Centre of Excellence was a great success, joined by their trusted suppliers and partners, WWT, 3M, Arco, Traffi, Women’s Engineering Society (WES) and Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET). The feedback they had was testament to how much the engineering sector had been in need of this support and investment. They have had fantastic feedback from their female apprentices about the new PPE, and some of their engineers who have worked elsewhere without proper fitting and quality PPE know how much this new scheme is positively going to impact their mental wellbeing and health. 

“Receiving positive feedback from our senior engineers, apprentices and key stakeholders has made this project well worth the effort. We anticipate there will be benefits to our workforce, our customers and the business as a result of the Centre of Excellence. We are starting with the engineering hub but the full roadmap looks to incorporate customer insight sessions and further technology innovation.” Rhiannon Brenton, Senior Manager, Operational Excellence Managed Engineering Services, Vodafone.