IN Brief:
- UKMHA has appointed Paul Dancer as Head of Learning and Development as it expands technician training and apprenticeship activity.
- Dancer joins from Stephenson College, bringing experience in training delivery, apprenticeship development, and industry-education partnerships.
- The appointment comes ahead of the opening of UKMHA’s Kibworth training hub, signalling a more formal push on workforce capability in material handling.
UKMHA has appointed Paul Dancer as Head of Learning and Development, a move that brings one of the association’s long-running training collaborators directly into its leadership structure as it prepares to broaden its technical education offer.
Dancer joins from Stephenson College, where he was closely involved in training programmes, apprenticeship support, and employer links relevant to the material handling sector. That background matters because UKMHA has already spent the past two years trying to build a more structured answer to the industry’s skills problem, first through its apprenticeship scheme and then through a wider spread of technical training courses for engineers and technicians.
The appointment suggests that work is moving into a more permanent phase. Rather than treating training as a supporting service, UKMHA is positioning it more clearly as part of the sector’s operating infrastructure, especially as service capability, equipment uptime, compliance, and safe working practice continue to depend on the availability of properly trained people. Rob Fisher, Chief Executive of UKMHA, said Dancer’s experience would support the continued growth of the association’s training and apprenticeship programmes and help maximise the use of the new Kibworth facility.
There is a practical reason for that emphasis. Material handling does not suffer from a shortage of talk about productivity, automation, and resilience, but all three still depend on technicians who can inspect, maintain, repair, and safely manage increasingly complex fleets. UKMHA has already launched an apprenticeship pathway with college partners and expanded its technical training provision, arguing that the sector needs a clearer talent pipeline if it is to keep pace with operational demand.
Dancer’s appointment arrives just ahead of the opening of the association’s training hub in Kibworth in June 2026, which gives the move more substance than a routine staffing change. A dedicated site gives UKMHA somewhere to concentrate technical delivery, member support, and industry engagement, while also tightening the link between classroom learning and the realities of workshop and field service practice.
For the wider logistics and intralogistics market, the significance is straightforward enough. Warehousing investment, fleet renewal, and automation programmes are easy to headline, but they do not remove the need for competent engineers, trainers, and safety-led maintenance culture. If anything, they raise the bar. UKMHA appears to be betting that the sector’s next constraint will be less about access to equipment and more about access to people who can keep it operating properly.
