Upskilling: It’s the future…
So, what’s to be done? With skilled fork lift engineers retiring faster than new ones are recruited there is an acute skills shortage.
Sure, you could poach someone else’s staff – but the chances are they’ll simply move on: selling their skills to the highest bidder. You could train an apprentice and, by doing so, you’ll benefit from someone who’ll be more loyal, less likely to leave and a better advocate for your business.
But what about now? How do you fill an immediate and critical hole in your operations?
Well, you could do what some larger employers are doing and work with the lift truck industry’s only accredited training centre, F-TEC, about upskilling.
“In simple terms, we take a promising individual and give them a set of real-world engineering skills to a level that makes them productive profit-earners. It could mean developing one of your own staff: a labourer, yard man, someone in the parts department perhaps” explains Karl Baum, Managing Director of F-TEC.
“Alternatively, we can upskill an individual from another industry such as transport or agriculture giving them the vital knowledge and techniques necessary to work on fork lift-specific areas such as hydraulics.
“It’s been tried before but invariably it involved pitching someone in at the deep end in the hope they’d “pick it up as they go”. At best this was a slow and haphazard process that usually ended in frustration and failure…”
By contrast, F-TEC courses provide a proven, fast-track means of giving candidates the knowledge and skills required to make them immediately productive… and profitable. Small wonder that some of the biggest names in the industry (as well as some of the smallest) have seized on this as a transformative route to solving engineer recruitment issues – in tandem with F-TEC led apprenticeship schemes.
