Luke Insleyis the new NCMTarea sales manager for southeast England. Insley is now responsible for sales of the company’s product portfolio, which includes Okuma machining centres, CNC lathes and grinders, Makino machining centres, and photo-activated adhesive work-holding systems manufactured by Blue Photon. Apprentice-trained with a HNC in mechanical engineering, his recent roles include applications and technical support engineer at a cutting tool company, assisting both end users and distributors, and sales engineer for a tooling supplier.
For further information www.ncmt.co.uk

A company that supports more than 700 apprentices every year has been recognised as the ‘best’ in its field. In-Comm Training, which operates two Technical Academies in Aldridge and Telford, was named as the ‘Training Provider of the Year’ at the recent Ladder for the Black Country Awards.More than 250 people crammed into Walsall Football Club to celebrate the stars of vocational learning, with the family-run firm impressing the judges with its £10m investment strategy and its recent record-breaking 199 apprentice cohort intake.The launch of the UK’s first ever Precision Tooling Academy also won praise.
For further information www.in-comm.co.uk

The University of Bradford is partnering with Keighley College and Bradford Council in creating an Advanced Institute for Robotics Engineering. The Institute, which will be based in Keighley, West Yorkshire, will benefit from a slice of the £20m Levelling Up funding announced on 20 November. It will be housed in a new, two-floor facility thatwill accommodate up to 250 full-time undergraduates and 40 postgraduate students in the study of robotics, advanced engineering, automation, artificial intelligence and computer science.
For further information www.bradford.ac.uk

The recently-held WorldSkills UK 2023 CNC turning and CNC milling competition finals, which took place at Tameside College, Manchester, saw students and apprentices put through their paces using machine tools supplied by Mills CNC.The finals took place at the college’s £10m advanced technologies centre in Ashton-Under-Lyne.

Both CNC machining finals utilised machine tools from Mills CNC, comprising a Doosan DNM 400 machining centre and a Doosan Lynx 220 lathe. These machines were installed at Tameside College’s engineering facility in 2016 as part of a six Doosan machine investment package.During the three-day competition, Gavin Dixon, a Mills CNC applications engineer, was not only onsite providing technical support and advice to the college and the finalists, he was also on the judging panel.
For further information www.millscnc.co.uk