Today officially marks the start of National Apprenticeship Week 2018. From Monday 5th March through to Friday 9th, employers and apprentices from across England are expected to come together to celebrate the success of apprenticeships. Be it marketing apprenticeships or signage apprenticeships (sounds great, if you ask us) – the intention is clear, to encourage young people to choose apprenticeships as a pathway to a career!

Hosting a Prime Minister for a tour of your business is an privileged opportunity, so to host two in less than six years is pretty special! Octink welcomed David Cameron back in 2011* and on Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May visited us.

It’s no secret that having an highly engaged workforce is the secret to organisational success. Employee satisfaction comes from creating an atmosphere that has employees feeling valued, respected, and more importantly part of the bigger picture.

This is the first of a series of blogs by long term employee Mike Bains, focussing on his role and experiences at Octink from when he first started in the business 15 years ago as a green apprentice, right up to his current role as Build Site Manager about to embark on an apprenticeship in construction operations management.

Productivity. Sit at any board table and you’ll hear this word uttered on numerous occasions. A word that many company owners love to hate. However, it’s something we can’t get away from, and to coincide with emergency budget day, Radio 5 live recently took a more in-depth look into differences in productivity between British and German manufacturing businesses. Yours truly was invited to join BBC journalist Fiona Trott on a visit to a German company based near Karlsruhe to see if, as CEO of Octink, there was anything I could learn about British and German mentalities, and by extension the reason that they are often more productive as a country than we are. The findings were not surprising: the integration between our respective educational systems and business, alongside a permanent programme of research and development. Listen to the full interview here.