Welcome to the March news round up.
I promised myself i would write this news round up without mentioning the C-word, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible. Covid-19 has dominated March and looks set to have an impact on the wind sector for the next few months. We are lucky as a business to be able to continue, albeit on a reduced basis, training during this crisis. We’ve taken significant steps to mitigate risks for our trainers and course attendees during the outbreak. This has meant the closure of our training facilities and a move to 100% onsite training until we feel we it is 100% safe to reopen the centers.
March started so differently
At the very start of March we were packing up after attending the AWEA O&M conference in San Diego. It was a great conference, we met up with clients and connected with new potential clients across the week. The weather was great and we had a small opportunity to enjoy some of the Southern California coastline. What a difference 30 days make! We moved quickly to ensure we could react to our client needs but most importantly to ensure the safety of our people and our attendees.
Moving onsite
The big story of the last 30 days has been our transition to 100% GWO onsite training. We regularly run training courses for customers at their wind farms but we’ve never had to run 100% of our courses in this fashion. The safety advantages are obvious, less interaction between people and less travel for course attendees. As training centers have closed across the country demand has grown exponentially. A big thank you to all the STL USA team for stepping up as in many cases we’ve been the last resort for clients.
Looking ahead
One thing is for certain this outbreak won’t last forever. When we come out of the back of this there will be a number of challenges that we will have to cover. Firstly there’s going to be a major backlog of refresher training that will need to be completed, second it’s likely there will be a rush of new hires. These will likely have been postponed during the lockdown. It’s going to mean a lot of training is required in a short space of time. To tackle this we’re working with all our customers to create a schedule for refreshers starting in May, we’re committed to running these back to back for as long as required so nobody’s certs lapse. It’s important we do this as lapsed certs require the tech to complete a full training course, keeping them out of the field for a full 5 days. We are working on a way for you to log your techs and their expiry dates into a schedule so we can then provide you training options, more to follow…
Stay Safe Everyone.
In the meantime if you want to add technicians to our refresher schedule you can get in touch below.
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