Meet Molly Craggs

In year 10 at school, someone came in from Rolls Royce to talk about what they do, and I found it fascinating. But someone said “Oh you’re a girl, what are you doing here?” so it knocked my confidence. When I left school, I was unsure what I wanted to do, so I did some sixth form, but I also enrolled at college to do a Pre-Apprenticeship Introduction to Engineering scheme, where you would do a block at college and then a block at a training school. I quickly realised sixth form wasn’t for me and college was a good transition from school into work.

I then got an apprenticeship through Procter & Gamble, who made perfume at the time. I did six months and then they announced they were closing down. From there, I applied to other apprenticeships, and I got one with Nissan. In the second year, you get to pick where you want to work, and I chose batteries. In my third year, the battery bank got taken over and we are no longer Nissan, so the last years of my apprenticeship have been with Envision, the leading battery manufacturer in the UK.

The batteries we make go into the Nissan Leaf or the electric Nissan van e-NV200. A small percentage of the batteries go to third parties, including Hitachi, and some go into static storage. Day-to-day, if the machine breaks down or if there is a quality issue, such as an indent on one of the sheets, we trace the fault back and sort it out. That could involve changing a component that might be damaged or faulty. Some fixes take minutes or it might be a three to four-hour job, if a robot has crashed, for instance. Some of the work is quite physical, as we might have to go inside the line or even work on top of it if we have to rewire a robot. In total, there are 28 different lines doing different tasks.

On one line, for instance, there are about six multi-access robots, 15 linear robots and a lot of pneumatics as well. If you watch it in action, it is really overwhelming. We write up every job we do at the end of each day. That gives accountability for the job you’ve done and also acts as an historical record. It is handed on to the next shift to flag things up. For the last three years, I have done shift work of 12-hour shifts of two days, two nights, then four days off. I also come in one day a week to do my apprenticeship work.