The Academy
Our vision
Our vision is to develop the most skilled workforce in our industry through investment in learning and our purpose-built Academy, which opened its doors in 2021.
We have a continued focus on skills across all our learning streams, specifically building skills resilience across our operational teams.
This is demonstrated by the large number of training events we deliver each year, with over 3,500 training events conducted annually.
Our in-house apprenticeships drive our vision, and we are proud to be industry-leading in our achievement rates.
The Academy is here to help...
How we deliver training
Garfield Park
We are passionate about experiential learning, enabling learners to practice and refine newly learnt skills in a safe and secure environment, at our dedicated learning facility Garfield Park.
Our Academy learning environment gives our people access to high-quality facilities that enable them to explore learning and practice technical skills safely. We continue to invest in our learning assets to support our people’s development, learning ‘hands on’.
Our learners benefit from:
We are at the forefront of training innovation and have introduced two experiential training assets, Hawksley House and the River Bown. Our training house and training river represent the assets, customers, and environments our learners will work with every day.
Hawksley House, which is equipped with working plumbing, enables all learners to practice interacting with customers, and our leakage learners to build confidence around the complexities of private side leakage.
We are passionate about lifelong learning. Whatever a person’s role, experience, skills or qualifications we support their development needs every step of the way.
We are dedicated to nurturing talent and developing potential team managers through clear leadership expectations and our management training toolkits.
Our Professional development learning stream offers a range of business-wide apprenticeships such as apprenticeships in Engineering and Commercial, Leadership and Management, Finance, Project Management, Human Resources, and Technology.
We are working closely with Customer Operations to create a comprehensive development pathway for our Operational Team Managers. This initiative will help equip our TMs with the essential skills, knowledge, and behaviours needed to lead and inspire their teams effectively, as well as manage their assets and sites efficiently.
Learning Streams
The Academy operate under five key Learning Streams:
Developing technical competence in our teams who treat, recycle, distribute and manage water and wastewater, as well as having a focus on health, safety and wellbeing.
Developing inspiring leaders who build engaged teams, nurture talent, and drive performance, while helping colleagues put the customer experience at the heart of everything they do.
Helping our colleagues to grow their careers and gain the business skills they need for today and in the future, and developing engineering excellence in capital planning, design, delivery and adoption of new assets.
Driving the highest performance of our learning systems and technologies to deliver the best learning experience for our people.
Our in-house quality assurance team is responsible for embedding quality across all our learning, ensuring our learning provision meets the standards required for our people, outlined by our regulators.
Our training delivery has continued to evolve, providing a rich set of opportunities for all employees to learn, develop and retrain.
Our syllabus offers over 700 courses, with carefully designed learning pathways to meet role-specific learning needs. Our employees benefit from dedicated learning profiles to ensure they are continually equipped with the skills, knowledge and behaviours to meet the standards required of them by our customers and regulators.
Industry-leading operational training
Building technical skills resilience
Apprenticeships are fundamental to our strategic pillar ‘Caring for People in Our Region’ and are a cornerstone of our approach to social inclusion. We recognise their importance in supporting the skills base of our region, providing an entry route into the water industry and developing a more highly skilled and resilient workforce.
Through outstanding technical development programmes for Waste, Water and Leakage we aim to deliver an engaging and inspirational learning experience that helps our learners, whatever their starting points, to fulfil their potential and achieve their career aspirations.
Our ambition for all learners is the same; to empower them to excel in their apprenticeship and progress into impactful careers within Severn Trent. By developing a highly engaging, logically sequenced and technically demanding curriculum we aim to inspire our learners to gain their qualification and achieve life-long skills.
We have been an Employer Provider since January 2021. Our aim is to deliver an engaging and inspirational learning experience that helps all our learners achieve their potential and career aspirations.
We serve both new talent intake and new operators, ensuring the technical capability of our total workforce continues to develop and grow. Our learners consistently achieve highly, and all our learners have the opportunity to progress beyond their start point.
We provide high quality apprenticeship programmes, learning on Severn Trent assets with the technical expertise of those who have done the roles or worked in operations previously. The learner experience of our apprentices is of a higher quality than external provision as we understand our business, we will teach on our own assets, our dedicated training team understand operations and our teaching approach is flexible to accommodate our operational customer focused business.
The Academy’s strong relationships with the internal teams in Customer Operations ensures our learners gain timely and relevant operational experience. They work alongside highly committed managers and mentors, to embed their learning and develop confidence and competence in their roles.
Our purpose-built training Academy and apprenticeship delivery will enable us to grow our business and insource more of our customer frontline teams. This will ensure we have the technical standards and expertise to accelerate our knowledge, skills and behaviours, and the right capabilities to drive business performance.
At Severn Trent, we recognise that we need a high quality training offer that is flexible and meets all areas of our operational business. We have developed technical bootcamps in Wastewater Recycling and Water Treatment. Our bootcamps follow the technical understanding and application delivered in our apprenticeship route and are accredited through CABWI, an awarding body for the Water and Utilities Industries.
We have successfully developed and launched the Competence Framework in Water Treatment, Wastewater Recycling, and Bioresources. This framework provides a fair, structured, and transparent approach to developing and accessing technical competence. All employees in operational roles are required to undertake an online evaluation, enabling us to identify specific skills gaps and tailor learning to individual needs.
This is delivered through Skilled by Choice, our approach to knowledge evaluation.
Skilled By Choice has five steps: