Toshiba Air Conditioning has won one of the industry’s top training awards for its national network of air conditioning training centres.

The company received the ACR News award for Training Initiative of the Year 2015 at a glittering awards event in London last month, hosted by celebrity entertainer Jimmy Carr.

The judges of the ACR News Awards said Toshiba’s approach in rolling out the network and supporting its distributors to establish their own training facilities was pioneering and provided the industry with significant additional training capacity at a critical time in its development.

Toshiba has worked with its distributors over the past year to establish the nationwide network of centres, comprising 12 fully-equipped facilities nationwide and in the Republic of Ireland. Located at Portsmouth, Bristol, Leatherhead, Welwyn Garden City, Harpenden, West Bromwich, Manchester, Sunderland, Warrington, Leeds, Glasgow and Bray (Republic of Ireland), the centres are equipped with working examples of all the main types of Toshiba air conditioning, including the latest heat recovery VRF systems.

The centres provide a comprehensive range of theoretical and hands-on courses aimed at engineers, consultants and end users. In addition, they offer CIBSE-accredited CPD courses on nearly a dozen technical and environmental-related topics, including the F-Gas regulations and minimising carbon emissions.

Toshiba Air Conditioning UK general manager, David Dunn, said: “As a leading manufacturer, we have a responsibility to invest in training to ensure that we as a company, as well as the industry as whole, have the skilled people we need to support customers and continue to grow.”

This is the third major industry award Toshiba has received this year, following accolades for its total refrigerant management and protection system, and for marketing excellence, presented earlier in 2015.