Kingdom Housing Association is creating additional opportunities for young people to get a start in their careers.

This Spring, Kingdom will be recruiting a further four trainees for posts within its Human Resources, Finance, Development and Property Maintenance (Plumbing) departments.

The departments will each take on a young person for three years (four years in the case of the plumbing apprenticeship) to gain the skills, experience, knowledge and qualifications to work in that field. Each trainee will go through a programme of learning both in the workplace and at college after which they will be well placed to develop a career in their chosen field.

Bill Banks, Kingdom’s chief executive, said: “At Kingdom, we want to provide More Than A Home which means not only providing high quality, affordable housing and care services, but also playing our part to provide opportunities for people in the communities we operate in. We know that, in these challenging financial times, young people can find it difficult to get started in the career of their choice. Kingdom’s employability team, Fife Works, already does some great work in providing employability opportunities and we currently operate a number of trainee and employment initiatives and have existing trades apprentices. However, as a large local employer, we felt we wanted to do more. This trainee programme will help an additional 4 young people gain experience and qualifications and hopefully be the first stage of their career.”

Bill added: “Our Board of Management and Management Teams are very keen to support employment and training initiatives and the trainee programme was formally approved by Kingdom’s Board, when the 2016/17 was considered at the Board meeting on 15th February.”

Andrew Latto, HR manager at Kingdom, said: “We are currently working on the detail of how we will recruit, select and develop the trainees but we want young people to know about the opportunities now, given this is the time of year when young people start to seriously think about options for their next step in life, be that further education, higher education or going straight into the workplace.”

He added: “We want them to know that a traineeship with Kingdom might be one of those options. There will be lots of opportunity to find out more over the next couple of months so if you are (or know) a young person who might be suited to a career in HR, Finance, Development or Plumbing, keep an eye on Kingdom’s website or our Facebook page.”