Karl Turner

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

I started my career at Honda, on the ground in stock management but I soon found myself teaching other people how to do my role. I taught them everything they needed to know to understand this intricate and complex role, and everything that goes with running an effective parts department. Then I became an apprentice assessor for Vehicle Parts Apprentices. That was 22 years ago, and I’ve been in Learning and Development roles ever since.

Why did you choose to do an apprenticeship now, so far into your career?

It wasn't a single event that got me to this point of studying for an apprenticeship at 51. It was more gradual.

It became clear to me in around 2018 that apprenticeships were moving on, that people running apprenticeships needed to have more knowledge of teaching and learning, so I started developing and designing internal e-learning content, giving our people the learning materials they needed to assess and develop our apprentices.

People around me were doing management apprenticeships, or people development courses, but I just didn’t feel like that was a direction I needed – or wanted – to develop in. And then I found this apprenticeship in Creative Digital Design and I thought 'that looks like a good one for me to tackle'. I’m always really keen to develop the e-learning materials I’m creating and it was also perfect because it’s an online course so I don’t have to travel.

My primary reason for doing this apprenticeship is to improve me in my role; it's not just about getting the qualification and having it on my CV, actually, if I'm not any better in my role, what's the point? So it is always about improving, being able to see the change.

Did you feel nervous about coming back to education at this stage of your career?

I'm probably just a little bit old to have nerves now. I tend to get more excited by the challenge! I'm not competitive necessarily against other people, which is probably just as well when I look at the calibre of some of the people in my group, but I do like to challenge myself, to get better and to see the improvement in myself.

How much would you say you have benefitted from learning from industry-experienced tutors at Newcastle College?

I suppose one of the key things I've got from my tutor Paul is confidence in what I'm doing. I have a tendency to look at my work against some of the work other people in my group are doing and think ‘mine looks rubbish compared to that’, but he reassures me that, actually, it's really good stuff.

He reassures me that he can see the understanding and the concepts I’m learning coming through in my work. But he also encourages me, keeps me moving forward, keeps me questioning why I did it that way and what other way could I have done it?

What are you enjoying the most about your apprenticeship?

It is probably all the new skills that I'm learning; things like Adobe and Figma. I'm now creating motion graphics and I can mock up apps and screens, so it does take the content to more of a professional level.  From a learning perspective, the content I have is the content and there's not a lot we can do, but what we can do is make it look better and make the interaction with it feel better.