Nottingham has received £1 million from the Construction Skills Fund in order to launch construction academies to get more people into construction training and jobs.

 

Nottingham College was the main force behind the successful bid, along with partners Nottingham City Homes, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham City Council, Wates Construction and local construction firm Woodhead Group.

 

The construction academies will allow learners to apply their knowledge in a real-world environment. This will help the industry address a skills shortage and support new learners, especially adults and mature students. The 18-month scheme is funded by the Department for Education and will be administered by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB).

 

James Whybrow, Nottingham College Vice Principal – Partnerships, Apprenticeships and Enterprise, said: “As one of the largest construction training providers in the Midlands, we have invested significantly in our facilities. Our state-of-the-art Basford campus, with its industry-standard construction workshops, means students are well equipped to enter the world of work.

 

“This funding will give hundreds of local people the opportunity to develop their skills on site and secure jobs in construction. We are particularly excited that our own City Hub site will be one of the sites to offer this opportunity, meaning our new campus will be educating its first students 18 months before it opens for business.

 

“We’re looking forward to working with our partners and excited to get the project underway.”

 

Nick Murphy, Chief Executive at NCH, said: “Winning this bid means that Nottingham people will be able to get the best training and skills they need to start in the construction industry.

 

“NCH have a strong reputation for training local people and employing apprentices.  Our work includes improving existing housing and building new homes, and we have numerous projects starting in the future. This will be a great opportunity for people to work on a live site and work first-hand with developers.

 

“On-site training is hugely beneficial, not just for us as employers but for trainees too, as it will help bridge the gap between training and working in the industry, meaning trainees are site-ready sooner. We hope this will encourage more people to look at training and working in the industry.”

 

Source: East Midlands Business Link

 

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Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site. 

 

Here at Time and Attendance South East, we are an IT partner of the CSCS, which means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems. 

 

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

 

• Contractors who are completely new to the system.

• Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.

• Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

 

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

 

• The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a Tensor.NET Client PC)

• Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system

• Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

 

Our access control system can give you very fine-grained user profiles, dictating which people can go through certain doors at certain times, or can be as general as “no visitors can get through those doors.” This allows you to thoroughly control the security of your site. 

 

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small businesses with between 10 – 50 users.