Welcome to another edition of Fast Five – our fortnightly series where we ask Victoria’s most influential and exceptional business leaders five questions to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of Australia’s most dynamic businesses.

NECA Education and Careers has a long history in the electrical industry, ensuring electrical apprentice jobs and traineeships are filled with skilled, dedicated workers.

In this edition we spoke to NECA Education and Careers CEO Gideon Perrott. Mr Perrott has more than 20 years of experience in senior management and business development in the services sector. His industry expertise spans vocational education and training, energy retailing, health insurance, and banking and trustee services.

#1: How does the NECA Education and Careers business model work?

It’s a really cool model, actually. When I explain to people what I do they say: “Oh wow, that’s cool. I didn’t know that existed.”

We are both a training organisation and an employer. On the training front we operate like a normal trades school, but highly specialised.

On the employer front, the way it works is we employ our own apprentices and then lease them out to businesses. Imagine there’s a big electrical contractor who’s been engaged to work on a new major project and they need 20 apprentices. We employ 20 apprentices on their behalf and lease those apprentices to them. We manage the complexity of employing apprentices for them while giving them the benefit of a pipeline of skilled workers. We look after the individual apprentices through the process and, if for any reason that job’s not the right one for them, they don’t have to resign – we pick them up and move them somewhere else.

At the smaller end, a suburban electrical firm might not do the full breadth of activities that enable an apprentice to gain all the skills they need to qualify. We solve for this by putting them with a host employer for a period and then move them to another host who does something slightly different to ensure a full skillset before they graduate and become licensed electricians.

#2: How does NECA Education and Careers benefit apprentices and businesses?

There’s probably three reasons why we have a disproportionately positive impact on the industry we serve.

Firstly, because we employ a lot of the apprentices we train, it allows us to put the right wraparound support around them. It’s sort of like the graduate program most large corporates run for Uni graduates, but tailored for apprentices. With us, the apprentices are supported throughout their full apprenticeship. A measure of the benefit of this is that our apprenticeship completion rate is about double what you get from mainstream generalist providers.

The second aspect comes again from us being both a trainer and an employer of apprentices and therefore our own biggest customer. That means we get unfiltered and instant feedback from our apprentices and employers to our teachers, and our teachers to our courseware developers, so that we can continue to enhance what we do in the training business.

The last reason would be that because we’re owned by the industry that we serve, effectively our owner is also our customer. That means we can focus on training the best electricians, which makes it a lot easier to be the exemplar and continuously evolve and improve what we have – an opportunity not really available to mainstream vocational trainers yet.

#3: Electrical technology is constantly evolving. What does the future of the industry look like for apprentices?

The highlight for me so far has been the Internet of Things (IoT) training we are running for electricians, which is basically equipping a generation of electricians to be thinking more about the role of design and advice to people setting up homes and offices that are going to have automated and connected systems like blinds, heating and entertainment.

I can see that evolving further as we start seeing more automation in manufacturing with robots and remote machinery technology that needs to be monitored and automatic intervention to help fix it. The most recent example I’ve seen is being used on farms. If there’s a remote pump that’s pumping away and then something starts going wrong with it, if it’s properly connected through smart technologies, where the electrician is going to get involved, it can automatically be told slow down but not stop until someone can get out there.

As technology starts getting connected and data and electric current start becoming almost substitutes for each other, the electricians are really going to be taking on bigger and more complex roles .

#4: Can you explain how NECA Education and Careers is helping women and other demographics succeed in a traditionally male industry?

Our “Women and Their Trade” program looks at the barriers preventing women from entering electrical apprenticeships and, working with our electrical contracting partners, plans to pave the way for equity of women in electrical apprenticeships.

Our apprentices in this program have an A grade Electrician mentor – a fellow female who can guide you through your electrical apprenticeship. Plus we provide additional training such as resilience training and strength uncovering.

The initiative is being undertaken with the assistance of funding from the Victorian Government’s Apprenticeship Innovation Fund through the Apprenticeships Victoria “Women in Apprenticeships” Project. Together we are helping to normalise having females tradies in the workplace and change cultures from within.

We’re also trying to attract teachers to the industry from different backgrounds. So whether it’s females or different nationalities or neurodiverse people, there’s two parts to it; trying to get more diverse students in while creating settings that are more appropriate for them.

As we move down into Dandenong, we’re already started talking to organisations that assist kids of African origin to build out what we have for a better cultural fit.

#5: As mentioned, NECA Education and Careers has a Dandenong facility opening soon. What does the future hold?

We have our principal campus in North Carlton. We have about 1,000 apprentices come through here every year. We are bursting at the seams. If we could, we would fit in another 200 apprentices between now and the end of the year just in North Carlton.

Dandenong is about building out our capacity. We’re pretty confident that once we open the doors the campus will be full probably within three to four years. It fits with our strategy where we’re owned by the industry and we’re getting signals from the market that we’ve got more demand than supply.

We need to create more supply, which for us is two challenges. One is creating the space. That’s why we’ve got Dandenong and we’ve probably got at least one other campus on the drawing board. The other one though is attracting enough great teachers because, as all of our teachers need to have been tradespeople, we have to entice more off the tools to become teachers.