AEROSPACE engineering company Leonardo, which has a site employing over 3,000 people in Yeovil, is bucking current economic trends by increasing its early careers population by 50 per cent over the coming year.

Across the UK, Leonardo is planning to hire an additional 300 apprentices, industrial placements and graduate scheme starters in 2023.

This will bring the total number of young people on early careers schemes to 900, an increase of 50 per cent in a single year.

Leonardo wants to bulldoze barriers to inclusion by recruiting a more diverse early careers population of trainees to fill current and future vacancies for programmes set to run to 2040 and beyond.

Ben Lavery, early careers training manager at Leonardo in Yeovil said: “For us, levelling up comes down to the investment we place in each individual who joins our organisation.

“We recruit on the basis of an individual’s present strengths and aptitudes, but also their potential for the future.

“Our investment in people takes many different forms, sometimes it is the provision of specific training, at other times it is creating the right supportive environment to help a person negotiate their way through challenges, whether they be professional or personal.”