Published on: 06 July 2023
Williams Jet Tenders, the world’s leading jet tender specialist and producer of 1,200 boats per year, has announced that one of its apprentices, Anisha Roberts, has won the ‘Best of British Engineering Award’ at the 2023 Enginuity Awards.
The Enginuity Awards is an annual celebration of the people and organisations whose commitment to engineering and manufacturing skills is safeguarding the future of these industries. This year’s event took place on 29 June, at the Park Plaza London Riverbank, and was attended by leaders from the UK’s engineering and manufacturing industries, including Williams Jet Tenders, Rolls Royce, Siemens, BAE Systems, Legal and General, Airbus, Babcock, Bentley Motors and many more.
Anisha Roberts, apprentice technician at Williams Jet Tenders, set the bar high as she won the SME Apprentice of the Year award, sponsored by BAE Systems. This award recognises the success of an apprentice who made a stand-out contribution to the workplace of a small and medium sized organisation. Innovative thinking, commitment, and skills marks out this individual as someone who is set to pioneer inclusive innovation to the organisation and wider industry.
Anisha, who is committed to improving the company’s environmental sustainability, demonstrated this through her pioneering work on a project to reuse waste fibreglass. Anisha said: “It doesn’t matter how late you start, get stuck in and do something you love. I am incredibly proud of myself for taking this opportunity, and for winning the award. I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone for their continued support and for helping me get to this point. It’s a surreal feeling, and I never thought I would be here.”
Anisha was then awarded the most prestigious prize of all – the ‘Best of British Engineering Award’, which was decided on the evening and awarded to just one of the individual winners from all the other categories.
As the clear stand-out winner, Anisha is a great advocate for how life-changing an apprenticeship can be and showcases the benefits of working for a SME, working alongside one of the owners and being only one of four people in the company with a certain skill set.
Anisha, who has two children, demonstrates that anyone can become an apprentice and thrive within the role. Despite only being in the second year of her apprenticeship, Anisha has already been identified for greater things by the business. Anisha said: “I hope this has a really positive impact on my career and inspires other people, old and young, to make them feel as proud as I am of what they can achieve.”
Williams Jet Tenders has built a strong reputation for its acclaimed Apprenticeship program, and was also Highly Commended as Oxfordshire Apprenticeship Employer of the Year at the OxLEP awards in May.
With over 140 employees and an 100 percent apprentice retention rate, Williams is the world’s leading jet tender manufacturer and UK’s biggest boat builder of its kind. The factory is based in land-locked Oxfordshire, and so relies on its Apprenticeship program to train their own staff to be skilled boat builders, continuing to increase apprentice intake with another three new starters in September.
John Hornsby, founder and manufacturing director of Williams Jet Tenders, has a passion for training individuals, and encouraging young people to go into boat building in a location away from the coast. He said: “It’s a culture and an ethos within the business that we want to encourage youngsters. We need to take people who haven’t had previous boat building experience, invest in them and train them to build the best possible boats.
“We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Anisha once again on her fantastic achievements at this year’s Enginuity Awards”.
