Gloucestershire Engineering Training opens new Engineering Apprenticeships training facility

By Peter Davison

21 September 2023

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Warren Thomas (GET CEO) with Jake Weatherley (Training and Maintenance Manager GET)

A brand new training facility opened its doors for the first time on Monday (18th September), bringing back engineering apprentice training to the heart of the Forest of Dean.

The apprenticeship scheme in Cinderford is being run as a satellite of the Gloucestershire Engineering Training (GET) main site in Barnwood and will enable young people to complete their first year of full-time training in Cinderford, with subsequent years of one day a week training in Gloucester.

Students will be able to learn machining, welding, and electrical skills from the charity managed by industry professionals.

Warren Thomas, CEO of GET, said: "We are passionate about supporting and developing the future engineers. There has been no engineering training support in the Forest of Dean for some considerable time, and we needed to resolve this. With the new centre in Cinderford we are hoping this will support those young people that are keen to follow engineering as a career path without the worry of travelling to Gloucester."

The centre has been set up with the help and assistance of Accxel, who offer their own construction skills training on the same site and KW Bell Ltd, who renovated the building in very little time. In April the building was still unusable and by the end of August it had been completely refurbished, machinery bought an installed and the site ready for the first cohort of students in September.

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GET’s Chairman, Tristram Southgate, said “We hope that this new centre will be a win-win-win solution. It will help young people in the Forest, it will help engineering companies locally and of course it will enable GET to increase the number of apprentices we train.

"Engineering is facing a demographic timebomb as many of our skilled engineers approach retirement and we need to increase the number of young people joining our profession. We see the Cinderford site as a really important step in doing this – bringing back traditional skills training provision to an area with a good base of engineering businesses”.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.