Graduate trainee wins in Top 100

Focus SB quality technician graduate trainee Stephen Cloute is over the moon to be awarded Young Pioneer by The Manufacturer’s Top 100 2019.

The Top 100 project is run by The Manufacturer magazine, in partnership with Cranfield University, one of the country’s top centres of business education, and publicly recognises the most dynamic leaders and innovators in manufacturing. Its goal is to change popular perceptions of careers in manufacturing and draw young people into the sector.

Winners are selected from hundreds of nominations for the examples they set to young people aspiring to a career in industry awardees are drawn from every walk of UK industry.

Focus SB's quality control and health and safety manager, Mick Hindle comments: “Stephen is a testament of how Focus SB’s graduate training programme can take someone with no prior manufacturing knowledge, and yet with the right training and mentoring, has given Focus SB an extremely valuable addition to the Quality Team. We are extremely proud at how far Stephen has come in such a short time, and he sets the bar very high for future graduate trainees.”

Stephen says: "I joined the engineering field after coming out of university with a Bachelor's Degree in Contemporary Fine Art, which allowed me to complete Focus SB's graduate training programme. My greatest achievement so far is the speed with which I've picked up processes, learning manufacturing and working techniques around the business, getting to know them inside and out to find ways of improvement to benefit us and improve our products' quality."