Working with a local secondary school Pentagon were pleased to welcome a Year 10 pupil for a week’s work experience.

We aim to ensure that work experience placements to Pentagon get a well-rounded experience and see all areas of the organisation, we provide a comprehensive schedule for the week for the student to follow covering design, mould tool manufacture, plastic injection moulding, quality control, packing, post moulding and business administration.  

This week the team were joined by Joe and his thoughts on his time here with us are shared below in his own words: 

During my work experience I have learnt a lot of new and exciting things about all the different areas of how Pentagon repairs and cleans tools and moulds and makes them with a lot of different machines. As well as how they produce and pack different orders for customers. I have been able to work and use some of the machines myself with help from some of the team members.

Over the week I have been to all the different parts of Pentagon learning and listening and sometimes even doing the work that the team members do. I especially enjoyed getting to know the team members of Pentagon and watching how they deal with marketing, healthcare and purchasing which are aspects of a company that I have not thought about how much work they must do to make sure everything is right.

I have seen how precise the measurements of the mould and products must be so that the customer’s order is fulfilled. Pentagon has a lot of different machines that are needed for the product to be spot on my personal favourite is the lazar welder because of how it can be used to build up metalthat repairs a tool it can also be used to remove metal if a small amount needs to be removed. Another one of the machines that I find interesting is the injection moulding machines this is because the machines can be used to make tens of thousands of plastic parts for medical and other life saving or useful plastic parts.

I have seen how they set up the machine by taking one tool out and replacing it with another one and then they have to put the machine to certain settings for the mould, like how many seconds it cools for or how many cycles of the product it has to make. Then they must place the new material in and clean out the old material so that there is no contamination which I find quite interesting.

Overall, I think that I have learnt a lot about the plastic injection industry and how they operate.

Joe – Year 10 – Work Experience student

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