The Composites Skills Alliance joined forces with its new partners Composites UK and the National Composites Centre at the JEC Europe exhibition in March.

JEC Europe claims to be the largest composites exhibition in the world. It's an important show for all those connected to composites, a global figure of 550,000 professionals employed in the sector.

The three organisations who have recently formed the Composites Hub shared a purpose built stand on the UK pavilion at the show in Paris. The UK was the country of honour and had additional exposure during the 3 day event.

The Skills Alliance, itself made up of 2 organisations - the National Skills Academy for Process Industries and Semta, the sector skills council for advanced manufacturing and engineering sectors - works with training providers and employers to develop composites training aligned with industry requirements.

'Co-locating with our Hub partners at the exhibition showed the physical reality of our virtual working relationship' said Philip Jones, CEO of the Academy; 'Any non-skills enquiries we got, we were able to walk the enquirer over to the relevant partner to be assisted rather than say we would pass on their information. We also benefited from a reciprocal arrangement'

The Hub idea - bringing together the technology from the National Composites Centre, the trade association representation of Composites UK and the skills body for the sector, in the form of the Alliance - drew interest from a number of overseas visitors to the stand. Most notably delegates from the United States and Australia were interested in setting up similar partnerships in their countries and could really see the benefit of the organisations sharing resources and intelligence, while being able to remain focused on their individual remits.

Following a successful few days at the exhibition, The Alliance is now focussing on its next event 'Creating the composites workforce of the future' at the end of April. For anyone interested in more information about this event please contact helen@composites-skills-alliance.com.