The Next 20 Years
Marguerite Okafor, 58
Runs a paid apprenticeship that places school leavers with local electrical and plumbing firms
“I stopped treating thirty years of experience as the end of the learning and started treating it as the material.”
Question 1
What did you think your life would look like at this age?
Quieter. I had a picture of fifty-eight that came from watching my parents: the house paid off, the work winding down, a lot of sitting in the garden. I had done the things you are supposed to do before then. Twenty-six years in operations for a building services company, two children through school, a mortgage that finally stopped frightening me. I assumed the reward for that was less, and that I would want less.
Question 2
What changed?
My last restructure removed my job and the jobs of four people who reported to me. Three of them were in their fifties and found nothing for over a year. The fourth was twenty-three and was hired inside a month because a foreman knew his uncle. That was the whole thing in one comparison. The work existed. The route into it was a set of private introductions, and nobody had written it down. I spent six months asking firms why they did not train anyone, and every one of them said the same sentence: we would, but we cannot spare anyone to supervise.
Question 3
What are you building now?
A placement programme that supplies the supervision. Eighteen firms, two intakes a year, and a paid eight-week block where our own site supervisor sits with the apprentice on the employer's job. The employer takes almost no risk in the first eight weeks, which is the exact point where they used to say no. Forty-one placements so far and thirty-three still in the trade after a year. I am not running a charity and I say so out loud: firms pay a placement fee, because a thing nobody pays for is a thing nobody turns up for.
Question 4
What did you have to stop believing about yourself?
That I was an administrator rather than a builder of anything. I had spent my whole career describing myself as the person who kept other people's work running, and I believed that meant I could not start something. The first year I would not call myself the founder in meetings. I would say I was helping to coordinate it. A plumber I respect asked me who was in charge, and I heard myself hedge, and I was embarrassed enough to stop.
Question 5
What is your next stride?
The gap between knowing and acting is still too long here. When a firm tells us a placement is not working we currently take about eleven days to move that apprentice somewhere else, and by then they have usually decided the whole thing is a waste of their time. I want that inside three days. That is the only number I am working on this quarter.
The numbers
41 placements, 33 still in the trade after twelve months, 18 participating firms, 11 days average to re-place an apprentice — target 3.