A NEW training centre with over £1 million worth of state-of-the-art equipment at Tallaght RTC in Dublin will be opened by the Minister for Education this Friday. The Technician Development Centre, which is the result of a collaboration between higher education and industry, is located at Whitestown Industrial Estate in Tallaght.

"We will be able to accommodate 200 students at a time," says Columb Collins, director of Tallaght RTC. "It's quite big." The collaboration between the school of engineering at the RTC, Intel and Hewlett-Packard represents "a significant milestone for industry and higher education interaction in Ireland," he says.

"The whole idea is that people from the two multinationals who have qualifications will be able to keep up to date with changing technologies," says Collins. The centre will also be used by many Intel and Hewlett-Packard employees at operative level, with Leaving Cert qualifications, as well as staff and students of the college.

The centre is seen by the RTC as "a generic model" for other technological colleges and employers. Collins points out that the increasing pace of technological change in the work-place means that colleges will face an increasing challenge to keep facilities up to date, and that industry also will face the challenge of developing its skills and knowledge base in order to remain competitive.

The centre is "one very cost effective way for industry and higher education to work together to meet these challenges," he says. "Two employers who would normally compete for employees have seen fit to work together with the college in meeting the challenge of preparing and developing technical staff for work in a highly demanding and changing sector."

The centre will provide a facility dedicated to imparting generic technology to students from a broad range of engineering disciplines. Collins says that the model can also be applied to clusters of smaller companies. which have similar workforce education requirements.