Nissan has launched a major new recruitment campaign for engineers and maintenance technicians to work at the company’s Sunderland plant.
Up to 200 new positions across the plant will support the current record levels of production, the introduction of electric vehicle technology to the UK at the new battery plant, and the development of two exciting new models which have been announced for Sunderland, the 100% electric LEAF and the next generation Qashqai.
The scale of Nissan’s new recruitment campaign is such that a new website (www.careersatnissan.co.uk) has been launched for prospective employees to find out more about Sunderland. This will provide details of all the new jobs, information about the plant and a section on the benefits of living and working in north-east England.
Kevin Fitzpatrick, Nissan vice president for manufacturing in the UK, said: “These new recruits will play a key role not only in maintaining our record production levels, but in making sure that our Battery Plant and future new models are introduced successfully.”
Nissan, as one of the founding companies in the UK’s new Talent Retention Solution (TRS), will be looking to match a number of its forthcoming job opportunities with skilled engineers facing redundancy from the defence sector.
The TRS was launched last week by UK Minister for Business Mark Prisk,and will match these employees to UK companies in growing sectors of advanced manufacturing and engineering.
Posts currently being advertised include Production Engineers, Facility Engineers, QA Engineers, Press Die Maintenance Technicians, Battery Tooling Technicians and Facilities Maintenance Technicians.
The new website also features a number of current engineers explaining what life is like at Nissan Sunderland Plant. They include Josh Blythe, 26, a press shop engineer who joined Nissan following his Masters degree and is now helping to plan for the start of Nissan LEAF production in 2013. He said: “I would describe Nissan as fast-paced, cross-functional, and very exciting. I’m part of the team working on the Nissan LEAF. At the moment I’m looking at a number of different production plans and capacity plans to figure out how the press shop will produce the parts for the LEAF.
“Since joining Nissan I feel as though I’ve developed a lot and in parallel have been working towards, and recently achieved, recognition as a professional chartered engineer.”
Carly de Silva, 32, is a process engineer. She explained: “I have a coordination role at the new Battery Plant, and as we’re at the installation stage it’s the busiest time for us right now. The batteries are built in a clean room, and we’ve never done this before at Nissan so it’s a big learning curve.
“I’ve been responsible for setting up the clean room procedures and protocol, monitoring those and trying to get it right before we go into trial production. Once we go into the trials, that’s when we’ve got to produce the quality parts, so it’s imperative we get it right at this stage.”
