Humber Chemical Focus helped lead and deliver a unique project in the region to support the specialist skills based in the Chemical and Allied industries. With the ever increasing pressures for the chemical and allied industries to recruit skilled and competent personnel, drastic action had to be taken to overcome the problem. As numerous surveys highlighted, a high number of skilled personnel will retire in the next five years from the industry and with the low number of people entering the industry, it will result in a skills shortage in the near future. From this foreseen problem, the concept of CATCH born.

CATCH (The Centre for Assessment of Technical Competency in the Humber) was a unique concept that began in 2001 and was demanded from industries needs. From a number of industry steering groups HCF hosted, industry directly formed their requirements for a Training and Competency Centre. HCF played a vital role in pulling together the relevant parties to form a public sector bid for sourcing funds. This resulted in a funding package of over £8 million for the construction and setting up of the site. HCF’s own core membership also kindly donated over £2 million pounds worth of equipment for the centre.

CATCH’s unique selling point is that it is not directly a training provider, delivering training or competency assessment on site. CATCH is a facilitator of training, pulling together the relevant training providers to deliver industries training and competency requirements. Training and competency assessment begins with the industries needs. Companies can utilise CATCH with their own training provider or ask CATCH to find a suitable training provider to deliver their specific training requirements.      

Even though Humber Chemical Focus is seen as the corporate owner of the CATCH, day to day operations of the site is managed by the CATCH team and over seen by the Humber Client Contractor Training Association board.  

Another core aspect to CATCH’s business plan is that it is able to host conferences and events in its own high quality conferencing centre. To find out further details of the CATCH project, logon to www.catch-uk.org or contact the CATCH Administration Team on 01469 552821.

Another great example of a large scale project that Humber Chemical Focus helped facilitate.