CMT’s Food and Butchery team have been busy utilising new remote working platforms for their butchery apprentices. The team have been active in utilising Microsoft Teams and Zoom remote platforms to train the theoretical elements of the apprenticeship.
We have been active with all our apprentices setting them various work programmes including mandatory qualifications such as Health & Safety and Food Safety.
Work is in hand to bring the practical elements of the apprenticeship to this new way of working especially designed for the End point Assessment.
Tara Davies CMT’s butchery trainer commented
“Adapting to the new way of training has been quite seamless and easy. It is a great way to interact with learners and is good not to have time restrictions and we are able to be more flexible with session times. I personally have found it easy to get into the new swing of things in an effective and way of delivering workshops via Zoom. A great tool I have also been using is VideoAsk and that has had a good response so far, in terms of setting up group sessions it’s a great tool to invite people face to face and can allow more steps once they have answered”.
Chris Riley CMT’s butchery trainer added
“At Crosby Butchery Training we are always looking to find new and innovative ways to give our apprentices the best possible learning experience. This year has been extremely difficult to integrate the new “normal” within the butchery apprenticeship. Fortunately, the team we have at Crosby have such a broad knowledge across the sector and strengths in many areas which allowed us to create and develop a system that reduced theoretical contact time with many online tools. If you were to ask any expert within the industry this would have shocked them with the thought a butchery apprenticeship would be done online instead of face to face. In fact, it has worked that well we will continue to use this method until a new type of technology comes our way. Historically, a folder would be given to the apprentice where they would do their theoretical work and every 4 – 6 weeks one of our expert butchery trainers would assess it, mark it and then sign off the module. Now, we have 24hour contact with the learner as all work is online and saves automatically which allows us to monitor their progress more effectively and feedback to the learner more formally!”