Nine Bainbridge Manufacturing employees are being trained to possess the skills they’ll need while working at the vehicle air conditioning parts company.

Welding instruction, robotics and other engineering basics have been provided over the past two months by Georgia Quick Start, a company that offers customized training to new and expanding companies around the state.

Georgia Quick Start brings the equipment and instructors that a company will need to improve and retain its workforce.

“We sat down and mapped out the whole production process,” said Abraham Levy, CEO of Bainbridge Manufacturing. “They said we can help you with welding and help you with this. We pretty much said these are the skills that we can’t find locally, can you give the employees those kinds of skills?

When they get on the machine, they have the background.”

The equipment Georgia Quick Start has brought in was excellent, Levy said, and he noted that some of the robotics machinery employees were training on would be identical to the machines he will have on the production floor at Bainbridge Manufacturing.

Employees were shown the basics of welding through virtual reality headsets, where they got their bearings before moving to actual welding stations. They have shaped stainless steel and aluminum, learned blueprint reading and shop math and studied computer numerically controlled (CNC) engineering.

Georgia Quick Start also provides safety and leadership training.

“It helps us become a leaner company,” Levy said.

Sam Smith, an instructor with AMT Welding who has been contracted to instruct portions of the training, has employees working on basic robotics operation this week.

“These guys are easy to work with,” Smith said. “They’re all eager. It is kind of nice in some senses to teach people who haven’t done a lot of metal work, because they are very eager to listen and take new ideas. Everybody here has been pretty sharp and easy to work with.”

Georgia Quick Start’s training program will wrap up in the coming weeks, and a second wave of new employees will receive training at the start of 2018, Levy said.