Business owners Paul & Vick Christie credit the success of their multiple award-winning business to “having great staff!” But as everyone knows, there’s a big skills shortage in Northland which is why the Christies
are prepared to invest in the future by taking on three new apprentices.

Over the past ten years they’ve put 7 staff through apprenticeships. Paul says “it’s important to give something back to the community and bring some fresh blood into the industry.” That’s a position that’s been rewarded with high staff retention including two former apprentices who are now on the management team and are actively involved in mentoring new apprentices.

Jayden Carter was with Ten4 for about 8 years. He began by doing work experience with Ten4 in 2011. In 2012 he started full time as an apprentice, qualifying as a Heavy Fabricator in 2017. 

Jayden describes Ten4 “as a bloody good place to work.” He says his time as an apprentice went really fast and he particularly enjoyed working under Gareth Eady (who also did his time with Ten4) in the repair and
maintenance side of things. Jayden much preferred the variety of work in that division to working on new builds which in his view involved “too much of the same thing and the projects took too long.”

He clearly recalls his time working on new builds and the day “I was meant to make 6 log truck bumpers, but I only got one right. The other 5 went in the bin. It just wasn’t good… I stayed clear of Paul all afternoon.”
But that clearly didn’t affect their working relationship as Jayden stayed on for another three years after he qualified. Ready for a change, he got his HT and left to drive trucks.

A year later, Paul bought a hi-ab and Jayden came back to manage that division but has since left to work in his father’s Transport Company, Dean Carter Transport, which he eventually hopes to manage.

He sums up his time with Ten4 by saying “Paul was a good bugger to work for. You could go to him with anything and if you had an idea on how to improve something, he was open to it. If I didn’t love long-haul driving
so much, I’d still be there because there’s no other engineering company I’d want to work for.”