A NISSAN parts supplier is addressing the skills shortage by taking on its first apprentices.

Tacle Seating UK Ltd, which makes seats for Nissan’s Qashqai model at its Houghton-le-Spring factory, has taken on four advanced apprentices to train as maintenance engineers.

Nathan Avery, Daniel Christie, James Baxter and Alan Cooke are the first ever apprentices to be taken on Tacle and will be trained up with a focus on electrical engineering by 2015.

The company, which employs 323 people, is investing in its workforce for the long term after facing problems recruiting suitably-skilled maintenance engineers.

Plant manager Jim Casey said: “Maintenance is a vital role within our business and fully-trained maintenance engineers with the range of skills needed by this business and others like us are not so easy to come by, so we decided that the best way to address this skills gap for the future would be to do so organically by introducing apprentices for the very first time and therefore growing and nurturing our own talent.”

Nathan, 19, and 16-year-old Daniel were recruited from outside the business. James, 19, and Alan, 25, were already working at Tacle.

Tacle has put together its apprenticeship programme with manufacturing and engineering training company SW Durham Training, which specialises in manufacturing and engineering courses and trains more than 1,000 people each year.