The new state-of-the-art training centre is part of a £1.2 million investment by Bosch UK, which sees Worcester sharing a 3.6 acre site (the equivalent of two football pitches) with Bosch Rexroth, an industrial drives and controls company.
The new facility will offer an entire suite of Worcester training courses for heating engineers and service technicians across all of its core product ranges – from gas-fired and oil-fired boilers through to solar thermal panels and a wide variety of heat pump technologies.
As well as focusing on product training, the centre will also deliver a number of regulatory courses that Worcester has added to its portfolio in recent years. These include the unvented hot water storage cylinder installation qualification and the delivery of OFTEC training and assessments for oil-fired boiler installations. Worcester will also offer a number of additional training packages for installers keen to comply with government schemes, such as MCS and the Green Deal.
The centre also has a dedicated Greenskies solar thermal workshop with a large pitched roof and scaffolding in place to offer trainees realistic experience of working with solar panels at height.
The new facility also includes a heat pump room, which features the full range of Worcester heat pumps – including ground source heat pumps, split air to water heat pumps, hybrid units and air to air heat pumps – all fully operational.
Phil Bunce, training manager at Worcester, Bosch Group said: “As well as the continual development and manufacture of high-efficiency heating technologies, Worcester is dedicated to training installers to help keep them up to date with the latest product developments and legislative change.
“The centre concentrates on our core product offerings however, we also have an eye on the future with the facility purposely being larger than what we presently need. This means that as our portfolio increases and renewables start to prosper, we have the room for expansion.
“With the opening of our new Wakefield centre, we aim to train double the number of installers we train in the north of the country to around 1,600 installers in 2014. Last year alone, we trained around 18,500 installers at our various training facilities around the UK.”