Nick Smith of TTE Training sees himself as the “living embodiment” of the difference education can make.
His “amazing” career has so far included briefing journalists on military operations as a commando-trained Royal Navy officer, overseeing a students’ union, and taking the helm at the engineering apprenticeships provider TTE Training.
In April, Smith joined the board of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers and he is also studying for a doctorate.
His office at Ellesmere Port on the Wirral gives him regular cause to reflect on the power of education. It’s on the same waterway his maternal grandmother passed through regularly when she and her family transported coal on a barge from London.
She never went to school and her illiteracy left her vulnerable to exploitation. She was “ripped off” with “inappropriate” credit deals, Smith says. That is why now “the biggest kick” he gets comes from seeing young people “meeting their potential”.
“I feel like a vampire sometimes because I feed off that energy,” he says.
Taxing tedium
But it took the chief executive a while to realise his own potential.
When he was 11 his dad left the army after 18 years as a squaddie in the light infantry. The family moved from the Black Country to a “sink estate” in Telford.
The struggling school that Smith and his brother attended, which was later closed down, failed to notice the potential in Smith’s younger brother. He was “a lot more intelligent” than Smith but had his “chances hampered from a critical age”.
Smith was less impacted, and made it to Liverpool University to study physics. But his poor schooling left him feeling inferior to the “very upper-middle class kids” he met there. There were “big gaps” in his mathematical knowledge and he felt “very aware” that he “hadn’t been as prepared for that university experience” as his contemporaries. He had to fight “tooth and nail” to graduate.
He recalls a lecturer saying he was “not taking his studies seriously” because he left term a week early to start a Christmas job at Boots. “But otherwise I had no money,” Smith explains.
These days, although his company trains up the next generation of engineers, in his spare time Smith is drawn to the arts; he takes commissions for his watercolour paintings and enjoys playing the saxophone.
His biggest regret is that he didn’t go to art college instead of studying physics. But it never occurred to him back then that a creative career could be possible.
Upon graduating Smith trained to be an accountant – and “absolutely hated it”. Three years into the course, a particularly tedious lecture on tax rules was the final straw. He turned to the person next to him and whispered, “are you enjoying this?” Smith certainly wasn’t.
Living the dream
A chance meeting on a train shortly after caused his life to take a new turn. A man he met had just been interviewed for a Royal Navy education officer role and inspired Smith to apply. Unlike his train acquaintance, Smith was successful.
During his training at Dartmouth, aged 26 (and already married with two children), he was painfully aware he was older than the other recruits.
Nevertheless, three years later he was serving alongside the Royal Marines. Wearing the coveted green beret had been a “boyhood dream” for Smith, who had been in the territorial army as a teenager.
To become a commando he had to “significantly raise” his fitness levels over the course of a “very intense” 12 months.
How many training provider CEOs can say they’ve completed the gruelling All Arms Commando Course, which includes a ‘Tarzan assault course’ with its rope climb up a 30-foot, near-vertical wall and its full-loaded, eight-hour, 30-mile march across Dartmoor?
Media ops
Smith loved his peacetime role as an education officer, raising the aspirations and confidence of young people who, like he once was, were “very unsure of themselves”.
He believes that most people “don’t necessarily appreciate” that the military are “experts in training” when they’re not fighting.
But when they were on a wartime footing Smith was tasked with manning the radio at his commando unit’s headquarters and delivering media briefings.
Fending off tricky questions from journalists (then and now) is “absolutely fantastic” compared to the tax lectures he endured years earlier.
Smith also spent six months in Northern Ireland, during which time his job involved giving young marines an “understanding of the cultural significance” of the tensions there.
He would explain to them how England was “historically a much more homogeneous society, because we’ve been invaded and taken over by different groups throughout history, whereas the Irish generally have been able to repel invaders and retained their cultural identity in a keener way. So flags and sectarian belonging mean much more to aspects of that society.”
But it was “challenging” to tell a young marine that, had they “grown up in that environment”, they would “potentially be exactly the sort of person to be recruited by a paramilitary”.
He says: “The initial reaction was, ‘how dare you?’ because we were all serving Queen and country. But if you can make someone understand that, then they’re less likely to offend when they’re out patrolling the streets.”
Moral courage
Smith’s eight years in the military made a “massive difference” to his self-confidence.
He also gained a sense of “moral courage” which means that nowadays he won’t “just walk by” if he sees someone being threatened.
His son and two grown-up daughters are “proud” of him for that, and he can see that attitude in them too.
“The military aren’t all closet Sergeant Majors. But we do all have a very honed sense of loyalty and service.”
But he was “really lucky” his commission ended before the second Gulf war started. Several people he served with were later injured and killed.
A few years later, Smith joined the reserves. He attended an inquest as a media operations officer for a marine killed by an improvised explosive device. Seeing the room full of the man’s friends, “all in tears over the circumstances of his death, really brought home” to Smith how lucky he was not to have endured similar horrors. “They stay with you forever.”
Liverpool life
His first job after the military involved securing new business opportunities for Vasishta Technologies Limited, a company set up by the brother of a royal artificer he had taught.
It was owned by an Indian company and its remit was supplying offshore IT expertise. Smith spent an “interesting” 12 months there before leaving to take on a very different role as chief executive of the students’ union at Liverpool John Moores University.
The “amazing people” he met at the union included the TV presenter Alex Brooker, then one of his elected officers. But he also witnessed during student election time some shenanigans he compares to “what goes on in the House of Commons”, with candidates “trying to entrap” their opponents to prove they were breaking the rules.
It was a “really colourful” place to work. Smith jokes how “the students flogging Socialist Worker on the steps of the Students Union became the stockbrokers of tomorrow”.
Tomorrow’s engineers
But the role, which mainly involved advising new sabbatical officers each year, became repetitive after a while. In 2007, he decided to jump headfirst into the training provider sector by joining TTE Training.
By that point, the company had already been established for 17 years and had grown to become one of the North West’s leading providers of advanced apprenticeships Level 3 in engineering and laboratory operations, and engineering apprenticeship Level 2 programmes.
It was set up by Ineos ChlorVinyls (formerly ICI, whose chairman is Jim Ratcliffe), Innospec (formerly Associated Octel) and Shell UK to provide training mainly in the chemical and petrochemical industries. The name TTE stands for both its registered name – Technical Training Enterprise – and the strapline the company uses, ‘training tomorrow’s engineers’.
Smith says they pride themselves on delivering personal development, leadership and teambuilding skills “over and above” the requirements that have been built into the apprenticeship standards.
The company’s 45 staff train around 350 learners at any one time.
They mainly take “rabbit in the headlights” 16-year-old school leavers, who by the end of their three-and-a-half-year programmes (two years at TTE’s training centre and 18 months with their employers) are “enormously” transformed.
Their cohort also increasingly includes those with degrees in unrelated fields such as the fine arts, as they can now be funded if their course was in a non-related subject.
It’s never a struggle to find academically able apprentices, with the provider rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in successive inspections in 2017 and 2023.
Money isn’t everything
But Smith does face challenges trying “to convince staff to stay”, given “how easy in theory it would be for our technical trainers to get a job in a college on more money”.
As a small company that “can’t afford to pay massive salaries”, TTE focuses on maintaining staff by providing a “good work-life balance”.
Its teaching staff are often former schoolteachers approaching or at retirement age, who still want to “do something socially worthwhile”.
“Money isn’t everything. People want to go home at night feeling like they’ve made a difference,” Smith says.
Ongoing learning
Smith is ever the learner as well as the trainer. He completed an MBA while at Liverpool John Moores, and for his doctorate at Chester University he is specialising in ambidextrous decision-making in independent training providers.
The fact some of us might struggle to understand what the term ‘ambidextrous decision-making’ means only “highlights the problem” with modern training systems, says Smith.
It means “a company is self-aware enough that they’re putting in simultaneous resources into exploiting an existing opportunity and identifying new opportunities with the idea of becoming a sustainable business.
“If you just concentrate on what you’re doing in the here and now, you’ll run out of work. But if you just concentrate on research and development, you won’t make enough money to survive… You’ve got to do both.”
As for AELP, he believes many of its members, like him, “get a bit cynical about the rules and regulations” in the sector.
“But we’re all still here fighting because we care about young people in society. We want to help them meet their potential,” Smith says.
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