The scheme, which has grant support from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), will finish in December 2022 and consists of 22 days of classroom/site training and a minimum of 80 days of on-site supervised training. The end result will see apprentices holding NCON Cskills Award Level 2 Diploma in Drilling Operations - Land Drilling - Lead Driller, and all candidates will also undertake a BDA Audit as part of the programme.

To be able to undertake the BDA SAP Training the BDA is an ATO (approved training organisation) with CITB, with BDA processes, content, etc., audited by CITB.

The first week of training commenced Monday 13 September 2021, with an induction day at WJ Groundwater's office in Nottinghamshire. The day was presented by Debbie Griffiths of CITB (specialist applied skills programme officer) and BDA's Paul McMann, BDA chair of Training & Education Sub-committee, Richard Fielden, BDA chair and John Grainger, BDA director and general manager.

This was then followed by the health, safety and environment element, delivered by Neil Breach of Fugro and Dan Wolfe of WJ Groundwater, both members of the BDA Health & Safety Sub-committee, and lasted three days.

The final day of the week-long training programme was presented by Charlie Lee Allardyce of Land Drilling NVQ Ltd, on the topic of site management.

Feedback to date has been extremely positive, and the second week of training is planned for 6 December 2021. This training section will cover geology (two days) and will be presented by Dr Michael de Freitas and drilling applications (three days) by Charlie Lee Allardyce at Soil Engineering Geoservices' office in Leeds, which has geotechnical laboratory facilities to support training. In addition, site visits will be made to complement the course content.

Two further weeks of training will be undertaken during 2022 (presently planned for March and June), plus continual on-site supervised training on-the-job during the course period.

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