The story behind the Academy
A family business — and a team grown the same way.
Watkins has always been a family-run business — and the Academy grew directly out of that. The original idea was simple: give our own team somewhere to train, upskill and get to grips with the procedures and policies that make us tick. If we wanted best practice on our sites, the most obvious place to start was with our own people.
What we didn't plan for was how quickly others would need it too. A lot of our supply chain — small firms, sole traders, subcontractors doing brilliant work — didn't have a safety professional on speed dial. When they hit a compliance question, there was nowhere easy to turn. So we opened the Academy's doors to them, and it turned out there was a real appetite for practical, jargon-free H&S support delivered by people who actually know the trade.
Around the same time, we realised the Academy had another job to do: support our apprentices. We've always believed in training the next generation in-house, and formalising that under the Academy made it sharper, more structured, and something our apprentices could be proud of. It's a point of quiet pride that the team you're about to meet is largely made up of people who came through that route.
As the Academy's grown, it's also become home to our CSR and ESG work — because the same thinking that says "train your people properly" tends to apply to how you treat your community and your environment too.
The logo has changed a couple of times along the way. The motto too. The core idea hasn't: train your own, train the industry, and do it with the values we've run Watkins on since day one.