Further expansion of Telford firm to bring new jobs

The rise of a Telford manufacturing firm continues apace, with the company launching a search for at least 20 new members of staff.

Since Proto Labs' launch on Hortonwood in 2005, when it comprised just three people, the company has now expanded to take on more than 100 staff, and moved to a specialist 136,000 square feet premises on Halesfield Industrial Estate in March.

Now the firm is set for further expansion, and is inviting would-be employees to come into its offices for a recruitment open day, when Proto Labs will be looking to fill another 20 roles which have become available.

Managing director John Tumelty said: "We have always successfully recruited from the Telford area for our staff, starting with three of us in 2005 to more than 100 now.

"We have about 20 identified open positions. The number of people we are bringing in at any one moment in time is increasing, so having 20 open positions across the company, whether it's relatively unskilled labour or designers, engineers and sales people, there's all sorts of opportunities in the company at the moment.

"We have 20 openings, but if we see good people who we don't necessarily have a position for we can create them in the future. We have taken on more than 20 new staff this year and that appears to be accelerating, so if we find the right candidates for a role in the future there is no reason not to take them on."

Proto Labs delivers Computer Numerical Control machined parts in small quantities of one to 10 units, and Protomold delivers injection-moulded plastic parts in quantities of 10 to more than 10,000.

The company can make, deliver and invoice a product in the same time it takes Amazon to ship a book, which has led to recognition including a Queen's Award last year, as well as at the Shropshire Business Awards.

Mr Tumelty added: "We have created a business which offers our customers something unique, providing prototypes or low-volume parts. We manufacture components in the real material companies intend to use in production, in the real process.

"You get the real material and the real part, but at reduced costs and in a much reduced time, which gives our customers' business a huge advantage when they are trying to get a product through testing prior to production, or when they have a low-volume product. The savings are at a factor of 10.

"We have developed all our own software systems and applications, and those have reduced massively the non-recurring engineering costs associated with designing or manufacturing mould tools or machine components. We have built our business around doing this and this alone, and doing it exceptionally well.

"Our biggest customer is less than one per cent of our revenue, we don't have the huge repetition in making the same component millions of times, we make unique components thousands of times.

"We have had year-on-year growth every year, and we are looking at bringing in a very broad skill set.

"Some people have misconceptions about what a factory is like, but ours is bright, it's clean and it's busy, and part of the point of the open day is to show them that."

The recruitment day takes place between 11am and 1pm, and 5pm and 8pm on September 15.