The College’s new Construction Training Centre will be open for business in just one week.
Staff are set to ‘move in’ on April 1st and the first groups of students will begin training on the 29th.
If you haven’t heard about the new centre, or you’re unclear on the details, you should check out my first blog here. That covers the basics – including the facilities and the types of training that are available.
As you can imagine, we’ve been pulling out all the stops to get the buildings, facilities and equipment ship-shape for the first intake.
But another excitement development that’s kept us busy of late is the centre’s new website, which went live last week.
The website’s been built to enable people to easily navigate between the seven key areas of training – plant, health and safety, scaffolding, highway and groundworks, warehousing (e.g. forklift training) and apprenticeships.
It’s also designed to make it as quick and simple as possible to book and pay for the more basic training online. This includes non-practical, class-based, one-day courses – for instance, Site Safety Plus, Health and Safety Awareness, and Driver CPC courses.
We also offer a more bespoke service when it comes to the more advanced and practical training courses; we understand that choosing training of this nature represents an important decision for you – or your business – so we want to work with you to ensure we build a training programme that suits your business/employee’s needs.
We offer you the opportunity to come and look at our fantastic facilities, chat with staff and get some advice and guidance on training.
If you’re not particularly tech-savvy, we’ve also published a brochure, which gives details of all our training and facilities. So, get in touch (contact details are at the bottom of the blog) and we’ll send you a copy.
I’d also like to give a mention to one of our key partners in this project – scaffolding safety and training experts, SIMIAN, who will be delivering scaffolding training at the centre. Simian are UK leaders in the sector, and their involvement has enabled us to develop a state-of-the-art scaffolding training centre which will be the biggest in the south west and which will offer a range of training that matches any other centre. The centre is intended to assist in addressing the scaffolding industry skills shortage and is much needed – this is evidenced by the advance bookings we have taken!
Another important cog in this project is the partnership with Somax. I formed Somax in 2003 as a driver training school, and we joined forces with Weston College in 2007 to expand the training offering. In 2017, we were bought by the College and, when the construction centre was proposed, we were asked to join the project, and I took on a role in its development.
If you’d like to find out more about the Construction Training Centre, or book some training, please drop me an email (simon.werkshagen@weston.ac.uk) or give me a call on 01275 465555.
Simon Werkshagen – Head of Commercial Construction Training and Logistics Centre
