Hats off to new training regime

The Ligna timber machinery show next week in Hannover will be big, bold and modern. Some of the machinery for panel and solid timber processing, joinery production or sawmilling will be as big as your house. In the forestry section huge harvesting tractors will demonstrate their ability to fell a tree, strip and cut the trunk to size in under a minute and mobile bandmills will slice through hardwood logs like a knife through butter. And all around you’ll see the flicker of screens, as this glittering technology will also be highly automated and computer-controlled to the nth degree.

But amid the 21st century wizardry, Ligna’s 80,000 visitors will also spot incongruously attired young people who look as though they’ve stepped straight out of the 19th. They’re usually seen touring the stands in groups, crawling over and under the newest machines to see how they tick. They sport black waistcoats, what look like some form of lederhosen and, most distinctive of all, broad-brimmed black hats. In short, they look like they’ve just blown in from Amish country.

They are, in fact, young men and women going through the German carpentry and joinery sector’s demanding apprenticeship scheme. And that they take pride of place at Ligna and wear their ‘uniforms’ with it, underlines a key aspect of the German approach to the timber business. This may now be a hi-tech industry, but its bedrock in Germany is still structured, thorough, highly regarded training.

It’s generally accepted that, by comparison, the UK timber trade and, maybe to a lesser extent, joinery and wood manufacturing sectors, took their eye off this ball for a while. Co-ordinated industry-wide training went into decline and the onus fell more on businesses to plough their own furrow.

Now, however, the picture is starting to change. Last year Proskills was officially signed up as timber’s Sector Skills Council. Since then it has worked with the industry to come up with a new national timber training framework and new and upgraded NVQ-level qualifications that will be recognised and have a value across the timber sector and beyond. The first of the latter are set to be unveiled over coming months. More will follow and ultimately Proskills will produce a comprehensive training structure, comprising the full range of qualifications and guidance on routes for training personnel towards them.

As its timber industry lead Helen Hewitt explain, Proskills can also help the sector tap into government cash to pay for training. In fact, this year it was allotted Joint Investment Programme money which means that timber businesses can get 50% match-funding towards the cost of employees achieving qualifications.

The end result of the Proskills project should be high quality, valued and affordable training once more embedded across this industry. That, in turn, should make individual companies and the sector as a whole more efficient and competitive and help bring new talent to the industry, with young people attracted by the improved qualifications structure and career paths it promises.

It could also be a further boost to entries for the TTJ Career Development Award, which we present annually to recognise exceptional achievement in timber training. Although, whether we’ll eventually go the whole German training hog and see entrants turning up to the presentations in a costume, I somehow doubt.