Brand and digital partnership with Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships

Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships · Plumbing, Gasfitting & Drainlaying Apprenticeships · Brand, Wagtail Website & Print Suite · 2021–2024 Engagement

The brand and digital work Obvious delivered for Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships across 2021–2024 — covering the founding brand refresh with Te Ao Māori integration, the masterlink.co.nz Wagtail website (including BNZ-approved direct debit forms), the Host and Apprentice Brochure print suite, the Gateway 2.0 Student Workbook, and recurring NoticeBoards video campaigns into NZ secondary schools.

All I can say is wow. Very impressive. Great work. Ciaran — unless you hear to the contrary, please go ahead with the release.Peter Shields — Business Development Manager, Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships
(on Obvious’s first NoticeBoards video, March 2022)

Masterlink is Aotearoa’s only national group training programme dedicated to plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprentices. Owned by Master Plumbers, Gasfitters & Drainlayers NZ, it places, mentors and supports apprentices into host businesses from the far South to the far North. Obvious was Masterlink’s brand and digital partner across multiple years from early 2021 — anchored by Joanne (Jo) Caine, Masterlink’s Marketing & Communications Manager.

A brief at the centre of NZ’s trades workforce question

Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships is one of New Zealand’s apprenticeship management bodies — connecting plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprentices with employer host companies, and supporting them through their qualifications with structured mentoring. The model is distinctive: Masterlink employs the apprentice, places them with a host business, and stays involved across the whole training period rather than handing them off and disappearing.

Sitting inside Master Plumbers, Gasfitters & Drainlayers NZ — and running the Wellbeing on Tap apprentice wellbeing programme in partnership with Master Plumbers — Masterlink occupies an important role in the country’s trades workforce conversation. As Masterlink has publicly observed, “we are seeing an exodus of qualified tradespeople heading to Australia.” The brand and digital work delivered across the engagement had to do real, measurable jobs: attract more apprentices in, attract more host plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying businesses in, and operate the day-to-day systems (applications, direct debits, communications) that kept both relationships running.

 

 

The engagement, year by year

1. Early 2021 · Research

   Website Research SOW (March 2021), followed by a survey of Masterlink’s existing audience and stakeholders (July 2021) and a UX/UI design pass — establishing what the website needed to do before any pixels were committed.

2. Mid 2021 · Design

   A full brand refresh, the Masterlink Brand Guidelines document, a complete UX/UI design system, component designs, and a dedicated Te Ao Māori briefing (Nov 2021) ensuring the brand work meaningfully integrated te reo and tikanga rather than treating them as decorative.

3. Late 2021 · Build

   The masterlink.co.nz Wagtail website was built — content-managed, with the application forms, contact forms and CMS structure the Masterlink team would go on to operate every day.

4. Early 2022 · Workbooks

   The print-ready Gateway 2.0 Student Workbook (Feb 2022) — the secondary-school pathway that introduced students to mentored plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprenticeships before they leave school.

5. Mid 2022 · Schools Campaign

   First NoticeBoards video campaign (March 2022 launch) — apprenticeship messaging delivered directly to the school-leaver audience Masterlink most needed to reach. The video earned an immediate “all I can say is wow” from BD Manager Pete Shields and a “ticks all the boxes” from Jo Caine on the day of approval.

6. Late 2022 · Print Suite

   The full Masterlink Host Brochure (substantial print run, with InDesign source files maintained for ongoing reprints) and Apprentice Brochure were produced — the canonical printed pieces Masterlink took to industry events, careers expos and host plumbing-business conversations.

7. 2023 · Operational Infrastructure

   BNZ-approved paperless direct debit form built on the Wagtail website — replicating the BNZ-approved process used by parent body Master Plumbers, enabling paperless payments for the first time. Apprentice Brochure reprinted with updated team and photography.

8. 2024 · Final phase

   Final phase of work covered routine site updates, content management, brochure refreshes and Meta business integration as Masterlink’s communications evolved. The engagement concluded later in 2024.

 

The discipline grid

 

The signature pieces delivered

The Masterlink Brand Guidelines (2021)

The reference document that codified the refreshed Masterlink visual identity — logo system, colour palette, typography, photography style, the Masterlink Link graphic device, and the rules for how the brand applies across print, web, signage, advertising and merchandise. Designed as a long-life reference that the Masterlink team could continue to operate from independently after the engagement.

The Host Brochure

The print piece Masterlink used to recruit host plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying businesses — the Master Plumbers members and other trades businesses who take on a Masterlink apprentice. Building a brochure for an employer-facing trades audience is a different design problem from an apprentice-facing one; this piece had to be commercially serious enough for a plumbing business owner to engage with while still feeling like Masterlink rather than a corporate brochure template.

The Gateway 2.0 Student Workbook

The print-ready workbook produced for Masterlink’s Gateway programme — the secondary-school pathway that introduces young people to mentored plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprenticeships before they leave school. Designed to function as a working document students actually use, not a glossy piece that gets thrown away.

The NoticeBoards Term 4 video campaign

The recurring video creative produced for delivery on Obvious’s own NoticeBoards secondary-schools digital out-of-home network. The strategic logic: secondary-school leavers are simultaneously the audience Masterlink most needed to reach and the audience most other media channels couldn’t deliver at scale. NoticeBoards solved that problem; the video work was what made the inventory worth running.

What Pete said. Very happy to approve this. It’s awesome and ticks all the boxes.Joanne (Jo) Caine — Marketing & Communications Manager, Masterlink Mentored Apprenticeships
(approving Obvious’s first NoticeBoards video, March 2022)

The BNZ-approved direct debit form

The piece of operational infrastructure that let Masterlink collect membership and training fees from hosts and apprentices paperlessly — built on the Wagtail website to mirror the BNZ-approved paper process already in use by parent body Master Plumbers. The kind of work that sat behind the scenes but did material economic work every month.

Outcomes

What this enabled for Masterlink

• One coherent brand system, applied across multiple audiences. Plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprentices, host businesses, parents, careers educators and the Master Plumbers parent body — the brand held across all five conversations without fragmenting.
• Operational infrastructure that worked. Application forms, direct debit, content management, Meta integration — the boring-but-critical systems that ran Masterlink’s day-to-day were built inside one engagement.
• Reach into the secondary-schools audience. The NoticeBoards network gave Masterlink a delivery channel for apprenticeship messaging that other apprenticeship bodies in NZ simply didn’t have access to.
• Hand-off-ready output. Brand guidelines, InDesign source files for brochures, and a content-managed Wagtail site — designed from the start so the Masterlink team could continue operating the assets independently after the engagement concluded.

Why this kind of engagement works

Apprenticeship and trades training organisations don’t typically have large internal marketing teams. Masterlink’s communications function was led by Jo Caine (Marketing & Communications Manager) and staffed accordingly — which meant the value of a retained creative partner during the engagement was partly its breadth (one phone call, every discipline available) and partly its memory (every print run, every form, every content update sitting inside one institutional knowledge base).

Across the engagement, Obvious operated less like an external supplier and more like an outsourced creative and digital team Masterlink shared with other organisations. The Wagtail site, the InDesign brochures, the NoticeBoards inventory, the brand guidelines — all of it produced inside a coherent multi-year engagement that handed back working assets and institutional memory at the end.

Industry training body, trades programme or national membership organisation?

Obvious partners with apprenticeship, training, tertiary education and workforce-pipeline organisations across Aotearoa — including the Tertiary Education Union, the University of Otago’s Curriculum Insights / NMSSA programme, and Whitireia and WelTec. The Masterlink model — brand + Wagtail website + print + youth-facing media + Te Ao Māori integration — is broadly transferable.

See Masterlink in the wild at masterlink.co.nz, or start a similar engagement with us.