Meachers Drive Its Team Forward With Training Programme

19 November 2014 by Lucie Chilton in Transport & Logistics

Meachers Drive Its Team Forward With Training Programme

Southampton based Meachers Global Logistics has invested more than £100,000 in a comprehensive staff training programme for it’s drivers and office based support team.

The company’s Personal Development Review scheme was established by Meachers to ensure its workforce maintains the highest levels of competency and industry leading skills. Staff have undertaken a range of NVQ courses from Operations Management, Warehousing and Storage, through to Management and Marketing. Six members of the Meachers team have recently graduated from the training programme with a further seven due to start in the next month.

Recent  OCR level 3 Management NVQ graduate Jon Godwin said: “The NVQ course will not only help me in my current role, but will give me a better pathway for career development within Meachers. It’s been a lot of hard work over the past couple of years, but it’s definitely been worthwhile and I am grateful for the encouragement and support I have received from Meachers.”

In addition to the office staff NVQ training, Meachers has also funded in excess of 60 of its drivers through the new mandatory Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC) training; a certificate which became a legal requirement for all HGV and LGV drivers as of September 2014.

Meachers’ Commercial Director, Gary Whittle, said: “A skilled, highly trained workforce can dramatically improve our business performance, adding value to our services and making it easier to compete nationally and internationally. It is also vitally important that we maintain a satisfied and motivated workforce to ensure we retain our talented team.

“From a drivers perspective, professional training produces smarter, safer and more economical drivers, so there is a clear benefit to the business in training our drivers to the highest levels of competency.”

Despite a well-documented skills shortage in the logistics industry, research by Skills for Logistics suggests that more than a third of all logistics companies provide no staff training at all. The research also highlights that only 40% of employees in the South East have received some kind of training over the past 12 months.