Learning, Education and Development (LED) are at the heart of what ceda does. After tireless work by our Technical Support Advisor, Peter Kay, the industry training standards were launched back in May 2021. In October of the same year, Rod Wood, Contracts Manager of ceda member company Keemlaw Group became the first approved Catering Equipment Project Coordinator. And now we are delighted to announce we have had our first engineer qualify for the Catering Equipment Installer Training Standard; Fianzo Baker of ceda member company Tailor Made.

He said, “I found the course on the whole very useful and interesting. The videos gave some good knowledge and were a helpful training aid. The company knowledge and assessment parts were very useful in gaining an understanding of the company structure, history and the processes that we need to follow. They also helped me to ask the right questions as they acted as a prompt when installing a new piece of equipment and to make sure I knew what to do in each stage.

“The course has helped give me the confidence to know what I’m doing and what processes to follow, especially when it came to the sit down/assessment stage of the course as that’s when I needed to make sure I knew how to do things and be able to explain it all.

“Since finishing the course I have been out completing more tasks on my own. I feel that it would have taken longer to get to this stage if I didn’t have the guidance of the course to find the information.”

Fianzo joined Tailor Made in January 2022 with an apprenticeship at a domestic kitchen company. He had some very basic knowledge of plumbing and domestic electrics but mainly carpentry experience. Tailor Made Installs Manager, Andy Howe remarked, “The ceda installers course offered an easy route to both help with training and to obtain the relevant CSCS card for Fianzo, as he came to us with no industry relevant experience.

“To take someone with no commercial catering experience at all and within 12 months be a fully qualified Commercial Catering Installation Engineer with all the necessary experience, is great!

“The course covers a lot of different areas. Having participants complete electrical competency, water regs, food hygiene regulations, as well as needing to learn about the company; what we do and what we install, makes the training so much more structured and gives us as a business the confidence that everything has been covered with nothing missed out.

“We would definitely recommend the course for all trainees, and we currently have another employee about to complete the course and two others about to start!”.

Background on the Training Standards

The industry training standards were developed by ceda as a means to enable engineers and project managers/coordinators to get CSCS cards which enable them to work on construction sites.

Historically CSCS cards were only an indication of a person’s Health and Safety training, however, in 2016 the Construction Leadership Council decided that CSCS cards should also be proof of a person’s qualification to enable them to do the job that they were on site to perform.

ACS gas accreditations were acceptable as a suitable qualification, however, the problem that ceda had was that there were no suitable NVQs for either installation engineers who did not have gas accreditations or for project managers/coordinators. Initially ceda worked with CITB to develop NVQs, however, having developed these, we could not get an awarding body to develop the necessary qualification and training framework. The reason for this was simply that due to the limited numbers it was not financially viable to develop them.

We took this up with CSCS to try to get the supply and installation of catering equipment to be classified as a non-construction related occupation which would mean that CSCS cards were not necessary and contractors would have to do on site H&S inductions for the catering equipment teams, however, they would not entertain this but were sympathetic to our dilemma. They agreed that they would accept industry Training Standards as  suitable qualifications for the purpose of CSCS cards. ceda therefore developed three Standards; Installation Engineers, Project Coordinators and Project Managers.

To date we have had 12 Project Managers/Coordinators complete the training standards and obtain CSCS cards and Fianzo is the first Installation Engineer to complete the training standard.

ceda’s Technical Support Advisor, Peter Kay, explains the numbers, “Whilst the numbers may seem low, this is simply because ceda heavily publicised the deadlines that marked the end of the issuing of CSCS cards without a qualification. Therefore the majority of engineers and project managers/coordinators either already had cards or obtained cards which are valid for five years before the deadline.”