Industry training needs your input

It’s time to paraphrase Lord Kitchener’s call to arms once more – your industry’s new training scheme needs you!

Last year the Norton House Group, the forum created by timber and related trade bodies to identify areas for collaboration, decided that training across the sector needed a serious shake-up. There may have been pockets of training excellence, but what was lacking was a coherent, co-ordinated national framework. This left timber lagging behind rival materials sectors and risked competitiveness. It also, it was felt, impacted on recruitment, giving potential new employees the impression that the sector didn’t offer defined career paths, or recognised qualifications.

The upshot was that the Norton House Group approached Proskills to be the timber industry Sector Skills Council. The latter’s job is to develop industry training structures. This entails rationalising, rewriting or devising new qualifications, to make sure they’re right for the job, and mapping where companies can access training.

Critically, the process also involves securing National Occupation Standard accreditation for qualifications. This not only gives them a ‘currency’ beyond the industry, making them a more attractive proposition to prospective employees, but additionally helps unlock government training funding.

Proskills now has all this under way for timber, working with a Wood Industry Board, a steering group comprising trade bodies and individual company representatives which held its first meeting this week at Howarth Timber’s Wakefield branch (p5).

The aim is to have a new training structure complete within 18 months. Proskills is confident it can hit that target, but what it wants to ensure that it does, and make the resulting new training regime as ‘fit for purpose’ as possible, is input from employers across the industry. So if you have information on training and qualifications that could contribute to this ground-breaking initiative, or views on your training needs you want to share, let them know by contacting Jackie Bazeley at Proskills jackie.bazeley@proskills.co.uk. They’re waiting to hear from you.