A new partnership between the Proskills UK, the National Skills Academy Process Industries (NSAPI), Cogent Sector Skills Council and National Skills Academy Materials, Production and Supply (NSAMPS) will bring a number of courses to printing companies for the first time.
The purpose of the partnership is to launch the programs, which have already been developed by Cogent and NSAPI, into the printing sector.
"Companies could have bought them from Cogent or NSAPI before, though it wouldn’t have been related specifically to printing processes and would have just been engineered for the chemical industries as a whole. We can now add our own industry flavour to the schemes," said director and manager of National Skills Academy and Proskills UK Group Jonathan Ledger.
The first programme ‘Process Safety Awareness’ will launch on 18 March and is aimed at educating leadership and operations staff about safety management, looking at the interim behavioural and safety management processes. Trainees will learn how to identify a hazard and the risks involved with hazardous equipment, as well as learning what measures can be taken to limit the consequences of a major accident.
"It’s a new and innovative program that hasn’t been offered in the printing sector before, and it seems to be something that employers are saying they need training in," said Ledger.
The on-site courses can take from one to five days and can cater for up to 12 delegates. An open version, where small numbers of employees from different companies can come together and learn on a training site, is also available for 10 to 12 delegates.
The programme has been completed by 110 companies in the last year.
"We aren’t reinventing things for the hell of it. We are making use of what’s out there by partnering up with those organisations that do a really good job of delivery with quality assured providers," Ledger said.
Ledger said that the programs are very industry focused and will shape skills delivery in the way that the businesses want it to be shaped. "If they want to create a new system then we will help them to design that. We are effectively a passenger on the employer bus rather than them being a passenger on our bus," he said.
Strategy director at Cogent John Holton said: "This is an excellent step for Cogent and its partner the National Skills Academy Process Industries to work with new industries across the sector developing key initiatives to drive investment in skills and deliver business growth."
