The first group of Apprentices to complete the CLAAS Apprentice programme atBarony College near Dumfries recently graduated at a ceremony held at the college. Their achievement was witnessed by their friends, family and CLAAS and dealer representatives, together with the most recently recruited apprentices who joined the Scheme in August and will continue in the footsteps of the graduates.

The Scheme at Barony College arose from the request from dealers based in Scotland and the North of England to replicate the success of the Scheme at Reaseheath College in Cheshire. In 2008 CLAAS UK made the decision to extend the Scheme and run a parallel course in the North.

CLAAS is still the only major land based manufacturer to offer a specific apprenticeship course based in Scotland. Demand for this course has been consistently evident not only from CLAAS dealers in Scotland and Northern England, but now also in Ireland.

Over the four years that they have attended Barony College, this successful group, who are drawn from CLAAS dealers Rickerby and Sellars, have been studying towards a National Diploma in Land Based Technology and advanced technical and industry certificates introduced by CLAAS.

 The CLAAS Apprenticeship Scheme is just the start of a planned training and development programme, designed by CLAAS to provide highly trained service personnel that meet the expectations of customers and have the specialist skills to work on modern, highly technical agricultural machinery.

Throughout their tenure within the CLAAS dealer network, the training and development pathways are progressive and aligned with the Landbased Technician Accreditation (LTA) Scheme. This sees the apprentices enrolled at LTA 1 at the start of the Apprentice programme and then upon graduation they become eligible for LTA 2 (Service Engineer). Subsequent dealer experience and CLAAS training can see them achieve LTA 3 (Master Mechanic) or even LTA 4 (Master Technician) status.

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