SKILLS & TRAINING
Don’t let our skills go to waste
The waste industry has come a long way in meeting its training needs, but funding concerns now threaten to undo all this good work. Barbara Beasley argues that employers can’t afford to let this happen
hen we glance back at the bad old days in the waste industry, at a time when the word ‘competence’ may have meant to your average totter how they threw the waste on the back of the flatbed truck without it spilling back into the roadway or how high they stacked the rags in the rag shed without the pile collapsing, we are looking at a mere 15 years ago. Flash forward to the present day and how used to the word ‘training’ the industry has become. When the Environmental Protection Act 1990 was first implemented, it was met by many in our sector with consternation and general denial. The fact that this legislation demanded that the qualification be statutory and policed by the Environment Agency did not help attitudes towards it. Quite suddenly, a budget for waste training had to appear on the agenda of the large private companies. Local author- ities, who in many cases took responsibility for household and commercial waste collection and disposal, were also faced with new budgeting. Unfortunately, during the first
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At long last skill needs were being addressed, but initially the attitudes of employers were again apathetic
“ ” 12 Local Authority Waste & Recycling October 2010
years of the certificate of technical competence (COTC), some candidates experienced quite high expenditure and the portfolios of evidence, in some cases, were robust enough to form the foundation for a wall!
System failure
If we look back in time, the apprenticeship system fell apart in the 70s, largely due to employer reluctance to pay for day-release to college. Many failed to see how a trained apprentice could benefit the business from updating meth- ods and attitudes. When the Government introduced NVQs, however, these eliminated the need for academic abilities and examinations/tests.
The emphasis was on practical ability and a ‘no fail’ sys- tem. This played into the hands of employers, because, technically if they were able to satisfy the ‘on the job’ part by ticking the boxes in the assessment folder and releasing the trainee for short periods of time, the NVQ was being completed in much less time than the old apprenticeship. Meanwhile the waste industry training board was devel- oping non-statutory awards to encompass refuse collection, street cleansing and activities on treatment, transfer and landfill at levels 1 and 2 NVQ. At long last skill needs were being addressed, but initially the attitudes of employers were again apathetic. Many argued that they were already having to dip into their budgets for the statutory awards and were loath to spend money on the rest of the workforce.
A real waste hero
That said, I did meet one true hero. While attending a meeting in London in 2002, I met a local authority waste management operations manager who threw me a chal- lenge. If we could produce successful, measurable results from training one of his street cleansing teams, he would
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