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John Deere dealer technician wins major training award
Masons service technician Jason Wignall has won a prestigious City & Guilds Medal for Excellence for outstanding individual performance. This makes him the first John Deere Turf Tech graduate, and the eleventh John Deere engineering apprentice in all, to achieve this rare honour since 1996 – a unique achievement in the engineering sector.
Devon dealer Masons is also unique in employing a second Medal for Excellence winner, Mike Strange, who received his award in 2000 as a graduate of John Deere’s award winning Ag Tech agricultural apprentice engineering training scheme.
City & Guilds, the UK’s leading awarding body for work related qualifications, issues over 1.3 million certificates annually to students on over 500 subjects spanning 22 sectors. This year only 117 of these received a Medal for Excellence, the highest recognition available.
In addition to his Medal, at the award ceremony in London Jason was presented with the Allan and Newton Memorial Prize for Mechanical Engineering and was runner-up in the Worshipful Company of Cutlers Engineering Prize.
The Turf Tech programme for groundscare technicians, from which Jason Wignall graduated last year, was introduced in 2002. This was based on the established
Ag Tech block release programme; both are run by John Deere in conjunction with machinery lecturers Richard Trevarthen and Phil Spencer of Brooksby Melton College in Leicestershire, with the support of the Learning & Skills Council.
Ag Tech was the first agricultural engineering apprentice scheme of its kind to be introduced in the UK, in 1992, and won a National Training Award at the end of 1997, the only one ever made to an agricultural machinery company. Altogether 265 apprentices have graduated through the scheme to date, covering both the Ag and Turf Tech programmes. A new Parts Tech scheme for dealer parts support staff has also been launched, with the first intake starting in September.
“We have always been committed to high levels of customer service, and to improving the skills of our technicians through training,” says Masons dealer principal Peter Endacott. “We are very proud to now have two members of our service team recognised in this way.”
Following his Turf Tech graduation last summer, when he also won the John Deere prize awarded to the best third year apprentice, Jason Wignall is now completing his fourth year diploma. He works at Masons as part of a dedicated groundscare team of four, handling John Deere’s full line of commercial and consumer equipment.
A self-confessed John Deere fanatic, Jason joined the dealership as an apprentice at 16, following two weeks of work experience and a Saturday job that lasted about 18 months, while he was still at school. “The homeowner side of the business was growing at the time, so Masons asked me if I wanted to do an apprenticeship and I jumped at the chance,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in everything from big tractors to small mowers, so this was really my ideal job.
“Being part of a small team means you have to do a bit of everything, and I’ve been very lucky because it’s meant I’ve taken on lot of responsibility quite quickly. The Turf Tech course at Brooksby has been hard work but great fun too. Richard and Phil set their standards very high, so I was very happy when my portfolio was selected to be entered for the City & Guilds award, and delighted when I heard I’d won a medal.”
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