Acquiring skills and knowledge

Drycleaners in the Republic of Ireland, in common with their counterparts around the globe, are working hard to improve the services that they offer across the board.

Now a Government-funded training initiative will help employees in these businesses to develop their knowledge and skill with a programme of courses that ranges from basic techniques for those joining the industry to advanced finishing skills for more experienced staff.

Skillnets is an enterprise-led support body that has secured funding worth up to Euro500,000 for the laundry and drycleaning industries in the Republic and has made it available to the newly-formed Dry Cleaning and Laundry Skillnet, which will provide training programmes over a two-year period.

The organisation is based on a network of companies, in either the drycleaning or laundry sector, that operates across Ireland. The companies will work together to address shared training needs, for the overall benefit of the sector.

SDML Consultancy & Training and Tarheel Fabricare Systems Consultancy have been appointed run the training programmes and these started in July this year with five drycleaning courses. The courses took place at a specialist drycleaning training centre that has been set up in the Cookstown industrial estate, Tallaght, Dublin.

The centre consists of a fully-equipped lecture room and a spacious drycleaning plant with EEC-compliant equipment that includes a stainless-steel pre-spotting cabinet, a10kg drycleaning machine, a 10Kg commercial washing machine, a fully-specified post spotting table, and a range of finishing equipment including a garment former, trouser topper, manual scissor-press and professional ironing tables.

Dedicated training unit

The trainers delivering the programme consider the centre to be one of the best dedicated training units available within the industry. In addition to the courses in Dublin, training is also available at the factory of Master Drycleaners in Sligo in the north west of the Republic. The Sligo centre is excellent and provides a wide range of both drycleaning and commercial laundry machinery, which is kept in a state of pristine cleanliness. As an example, the post spotting equipment is cleaned internally every week.

Six consecutive courses are being run Monday to Saturday in Dublin with a course on the following Monday in Sligo. Comprehensive course support notes and documentation are provided for each student.

To date, 19 one-day courses have been given.

The subjects covered include stain removal, processing delicate, problem and designer label garments, machine maintenance and solvent management, garment finishing and wetcleaning and washing.

The current training programme runs up to December 2008 and is designed to give the students a good grounding in the underlying theory of each subject coupled with some practical hands on tuition. Feedback so far from student assessments has been very positive with high approval ratings for every subject.

The laundry courses begin on 4 November 2008 with three training days at Celtic Linen, and further three days at Spring Grove Services starting on 24 November. Both courses have been approved by FETAC, the awarding body for national qualifications in Ireland.