Transitional courses launched for ‘non-food’ engineers

Reaseheath College, Cheshire, is launching a drive to convert engineers to food processing from other sectors.

The institution, which is based near Nantwich, set up a 12-week Level 4 distance learning course in food engineering three months ago and is working on a similar two-week intensive course.
Recruits to the three-month programme have so far come from companies within the industry seeking to improve the skills of existing employees. However, Reaseheath means to target job centres and engineering firms outside the food industry that were making staff redundant for both courses.
“We’ve done preliminary mapping of the difference between food engineers and engineers from, say, an automotive background and there are similarities between the two groups,” said dairy training and development manager Chris Edwards.
The major areas of difference in knowledge, said Edwards, were food safety, food preservation techniques, such as pasteurisation or cooking, and specialist equipment. Provided these areas could be adequately tackled, transferring engineers from other sectors into the food industry would be achievable, he said.
Reaseheath’s initiative would help offset the lack of qualified engineers in the food industry and the failure of food engineering degrees to attract high intakes of students.
Reaseheath is in the process of upgrading its food processing training facilities and aims to complete the process in April 2010. Once this had been done, the college would be able to train prospective food engineers by assigning them machines such as pumps, homogenisers and pasteurisers to strip down.
“We’ve also had enquiries from dairy installation engineers,” said Edwards.