Our Social Mission Statement
ATP (Animal Technician Programme) is a social enterprise that is committed to linking employers, educational establishments, job seekers and social advisory bodies to inspire and promote the career of an Animal Technician within the medical research industry, by offering more open and fairer opportunities for employment.
ATP’s social mission is to link employers with both students and job seekers via a variety of accessible employment routeways. ATP is passionately committed to supporting every candidate to find work by improving on their employability skills with the same end goal, to successfully secure and sustain employment as an Animal Technician
What is ATP looking to achieve?
The Animal Technician Programme (ATP) identifies, inspires and prepares new Animal Technicians for an exciting career within the UK Life Sciences workplace.
Our ATP employability programme aims to offer support services to educate animal workers on the industry whilst providing them with employability skills to help them gain sustainable employment as an Animal Technician. We believe in giving everyone a fairer chance to access the career path as an Animal Technician by allowing applicants to demonstrate their abilities through a variety of alternative routeways such as video interviews, training and work placements. We are committed to working with our budding animal technicians to develop their employability factors by building a portfolio based on what they ‘can do’.
ATP sets out to work ‘differently’ by offering ring fenced opportunities and work placements to showcase what someone is capable of as opposed to standard traditional recruitment methods
Why did we create the ATP?
What makes ATP so unique, is that we offer exclusive opportunities to all groups of people via work placements. We recognised that as a career – the life science industry was not an option which was discussed openly with people who were looking to work with animals. The role of an animal technician was not something many people were prepared to talk about. ATP also noticed a huge lack of awareness or understanding when it came to employers and their selection procedures. Many Animal lovers were being deprived of opportunities at interview stage due to their lack of employability skills or social skills.
Many of the animal technicians we have placed into work are fantastic working with animals but lacked the ability to put in an outstanding application or to win an employer over during interview due to their lack of social skills. We decided to get employers thinking differently by creating open and fairer opportunities via the ATP. ATP is breaking down barriers by asking employers to open up their doors by giving more real-life work experiences
ATP recognised that there was a weak link between colleges, universities and typical government-funded advisory bodies such as Job Centres and their subcontractors. ATP is committed to actively promoting awareness of the career path via college lectures, information workshops and webinars. In its first year, ATP has proudly forged some strong links between educational establishments and local employers of Animal Technicians across the UK. ATP now has 21 educational partners to be exact, along with multiple jobcentre relationships.
