Chris Claydon has a biography better suited to James Bond than to the chief executive of a training provider for building service engineers.
He has flown Apache military helicopters, briefed cabinet ministers on evacuations from the Arab Spring uprisings, and helped save lives by designing countermeasures to the roadside bombs used in Afghanistan. Oh, and he used to live in a castle.
That all happened in his previous life in the British Army, which he left in 2015 at the age of 50. Claydon spent the next seven years as chief executive of The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), the employer-led skills body for the engineering and construction workforce, where he honed his corporate skills and gleaned intelligence on what employers say they want.
That came in useful for his next and current role leading JTL, a charity providing advanced apprenticeships in electrical installation, engineering maintenance and mechanical engineering services.
