Apprenticeships at any age: Shannon's transition from the army into housing

The UK faces a growing NEET (not in education, employment or training) challenge, and PfP Thrive is working to tackle this directly by creating accessible routes into meaningful careers. Through employer-linked apprenticeships, local training programmes and targeted outreach, PfP Thrive connects young people who might otherwise become NEETs with practical pathways into housing, trades and operational roles.

Here we meet Shannon Moran, who plays an important role in supporting work experience and apprenticeship programmes at Bromford Flagship LiveWest (BFL). Working closely with the Future Careers team and operational colleagues across BFL, Shannon helps connect work experience applicants with placements throughout the organisation. This work supports young people as they explore potential career paths and take their first steps towards employment in the housing sector.

At 15, Shannon Moran left school in Lowestoft with no qualifications and not much of a plan. At 16, he joined the army. By the time he left, seven years later, he had passed selection for the airborne artillery and earned his parachute wings. Now 31, he manages a team of 13 managing empty homes across the east of England, and he is working towards a Level 5 management qualification with PfP Thrive, an apprenticeship he had long assumed would never be open to him.

By his own account he was "a bit of a naughty kid" at school who didn't listen much and later came to regret it. After a couple of months at McDonald's, the army felt like the only option for a career. "There was nothing else really I could go into," he said.

Shannon trained with the Royal Artillery, and served first with 4th Regiment Royal Artillery in North Yorkshire before transferring to Colchester to join the airborne artillery. He passed the demanding P Company selection course to earn his parachute wings, and seeking a new challenge, he left the military in 2018.

From the army into housing

During his transition out, Shannon used his army resettlement funding for a new entrants’ gas course at Gastec in Milton Keynes, a training centre that takes on a lot of ex-forces personnel. Six weeks later he was a qualified gas engineer and he joined Gasway, the Norwich-based heating company that Flagship acquired in 2016.

He worked his way up from engineer to service and breakdown engineer, then team leader, then supervisor, before moving across into Flagship Services and up into management.

He said: "I chose the safe career route and chose to work for a social housing company, which I'm happy with."

Shannon said he had long assumed that the opportunity to do an apprenticeship had passed him by.

He said: "I thought by joining the army at 16 and progressing through my career, I'd missed my chance to ever do one. Some of my friends did carpentry apprenticeships, boat building apprenticeships, coming out of school. I always thought, well, I never got that, because I chose to join the army."

He had started a level 3 with a different provider, then paused it when the job got too demanding to study alongside. During that break, BFL’s Head of Future Skills and Partnerships, Nadine Tapp, got in touch about restarting with a new provider. By then Shannon felt the level 3 team leader course sat below where he had got to, so the plan changed: he would go straight onto level 5. He is now working towards a Level 5 in Operational Management - the Operations and Departmental Manager standard - delivered through PfP Thrive. He started in December 2025 and is due to finish in January 2028.

A week in the life

Shannon runs empty homes – which are often called ‘voids’ in the housing sector – across a patch stretching from Yarmouth down to Saxmundham. When a BFL customer moves out, members of his team strip back, paint, decorate, fix, and run electrical and gas safety checks to get each home back to a lettable standard for the next family.

The week has a fixed rhythm. On Mondays he usually inspects the new empties and scopes out what works need to be done. Tuesdays he is out in the van checking on his operatives, their progress, their kit and their safety. Wednesdays and Fridays he sets aside protected time for his level 5 work, blocking Friday afternoons to focus on it because the workforce finishes at 2pm. At home there are two young kids, a partner and a house to run, which made for a “pretty hectic” lifestyle. “But we get by," he said.

Every couple of months Shannon travels to the PfP Thrive Academy in Derby for face-to-face training. The part he finds hardest is the night away from his family, something he guards closely after years of army postings. The centre itself is modern, clean and well kitted out. Shannon said: "I'd be really happy if I was doing a full-time apprenticeship out there."

Shannon credits Cathy Barwise, the Lead Academy Tutor at PfP Thrive, as a major influence. Shannon had spent years wondering whether he had ADHD. "It's always been there in my brain," he said. He mentioned it to Cathy early in the course, and she suggested he get checked. He did, and now has a diagnosis. He said the hardest part of the course was not the content but managing his time around it.

He said: "A lot of the time I'll push something down the line, and then it gets to a couple of weeks before a module's due and I think, oh God, I've got no time now." He said Cathy gave him the support he needed both before and after the diagnosis.

A DISC personality assessment early in the course also caught him off guard. Shannon went in expecting one result and got another. He said: "I was like, yeah, I'm a red, I'm authoritative, I'm this, I'm that."

Instead, it scored him high on influence and on the people side. "I thought, this can't be right. When I read into it, I realised it was completely right. I'd been wrong about myself the whole time."

He adds: "When people say to me, oh, you're compassionate, I always think, no I'm not, you're just saying it. But when I sit down and think about it properly, I am."

The work he is proudest of bears that out. He took over an empty homes team that was struggling, with low morale and several people close to leaving, who then ended up staying.

Shannon said: "All the members of the team are still the same as back then. But they're all now happy, they're thriving, they enjoy work. We laugh when we're together. For me, that's massive."

The bigger picture

Shannon links the case for training to the sector's reputation. Housing associations, he said, have carried a stigma for cut-price work. He said: "Rightly or wrongly, that's the perception."

But Shannon wants that to change. He said: "It's important that we, as housing associations, train up our staff and show people we're not doing shoddy work. We're not cowboys. We're doing work to the best of our abilities and, with the budgets we've got, delivering a really good, finished product."

The problem, as he sees it, is that the good work goes unreported. "The success stories never really make it out,” he said. “It's always the negatives you hear most."

Shannon also sits on the team running BFL’s work experience and apprenticeship scheme, so he sees the recruitment side too and knows first-hand about the skills shortage the housing sector is facing.  

He said younger workers were now often looking away from the trades and towards the tech sector, which he said was a shame. He said: “A lot of work needs to go into making it more appealing and more exciting."
Training alongside people from other organisations through PfP Thrive, he said, has worked both ways. "We're learning a lot about what they do, how they carry themselves, as well as passing on information from our side,” he said. “As organisations we're working well together, feeding off each other. I definitely feel like I'm part of something big."

Shannon has clear goals. In five years, he wants to be in senior management, an operations manager or head of a function. In 10, he is aiming for the boardroom. He said: “I’d like to be a director of a business, or a member of the board, so I can help shape that business, make change, be that driving force."

Shannon said he considered there to be two parts to success – the first one personal, which comes from having a happy, healthy family, a functional home, and being comfortable. Professional success, he said, comes from not standing still.

He said: “If I'm stagnant, I'm not pushing."

For now, that means being coached by one of BFL’s directors and pressing his line manager for more responsibility and more budget visibility.

Shannon said he would recommend any 17-year-olds weighing up their options to consider doing an apprenticeship.

"Follow your passion,” he said. “Don't go into something because someone said you should. But look at an apprenticeship first. Don't think you have to go straight to university." He said many friends took the university route and ended up somewhere unrelated.

"Even when they finished, the qualification had no similarity to the job they went into,” he said. “An apprenticeship is a great way of understanding the day-to-day work life while staying in education."
Shannon said his message to the housing sector was to: "Keep our eyes on the bigger picture of solving the housing crisis. There are still so many people out there struggling, who need the support. Just keep pushing to solve it."

Shannon Moran is Repairs and Voids Manager at BFL and a Level 5 Operational Management learner with PfP Thrive, studying while running empty homes across the east of England. BFL is proud to take part in the PfP Thrive Skills Relay.