Meet Kelly Shotton

Hi, my name's Kelly Shotton and I'm a third-year electrical apprentice at Foodmach, Echuca.

I feel like people don't even know that this is a part of being an electrician. Gazza! I feel like it's important for people to hear my story to understand that there is more than one way to get to where you wanna go.

Something I didn't realise about vocational training before I started was that everything's a lot more hands-on. Usually in school, you're sitting there with a workbook. But at least with vocational training, you get that hands-on experience, which, for me, was how I learn.

I can't sit in front of a computer all day.

Some of the perks here of working at Foodmach is once we pack down the machines, we always get to travel around with them. We can end up over in Fiji, which I was fortunate enough to do, or we can end up in Ballarat seeing the countryside into the middle of Australia. I hadn't done my maths in a long time and as part of being a sparkie, there's a lot of maths involved. But with the vocational training, especially at Bendigo TAFE, there were plenty of teachers and teachers aides to help you get back up to the place where you needed to be.

It wasn't until I started here at Foodmach that I realised it was possible to actually love your job. Straight out of school, I knew university wasn't for me. So if I didn't do a VET course, I'd be still jumping around jobs figuring out what I wanna do.

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