Agri Training is set to become New Zealand’s newest education provider and will be based in Mid Canterbury. The Agri Training programme will be fully user pays and has a goal of lifting training in the primary industries to a new standard in partnership with the world-renowned City & Guilds who have been providing technical skills education and corporate learning development training programmes since 1878. The partnership with City & Guilds complements the Agri Training programme, and as a result offers the diplomas credibility for graduates and employers. The programme will have specialist streams across dairy production, arable, sheep & beef, and deer offering students skill choices for the future and a wide-ranging knowledge as part of a new, innovative strategy that will offer a unique approach to training and assessment across the agricultural industry.
The Agri Training programme has been in the making for several years and has been guided to its launch by Co-Founder Matt Jones who has had a long involvement with agribusiness and recruitment over a 20-year period. “Having dealt with thousands of clients and potential candidates who were looking to be placed within the primary industries I can see from both sides the skills that are desperately needed by employers and in demand by candidates”, said Matt Jones. This has been taken into account as the Agri Training programme has been built over recent years and as a result a style of training has been developed to ensure students are trained in a very accountable way that is transparent to employers who can literally see what they are getting during farm placements, and also when hiring graduates.
Matt Jones says, “One key element of the education industry that we are very aware of is how future employers perceive qualifications and what it will mean to them in terms of valuable employees, and the feedback we’ve received to date about how we are structuring our programme is that it will produce an elite graduate who can hit the ground running with confidence and capability”. Agri Training has already attracted a strong group of potential students who are wanting to define how they can enter the world of primary industries. Those students range from secondary students considering their careers through to people in the workforce who are considering a change.