Keeping up to date

The readership of the blog is growing.

I know it is because when I ask people if they read my blog, I get a lot of positive responses. I also hear people promoting the blog as a useful source of information about the TQS.

It's great having plenty of visitors to the blog and knowing that people like it.

If you would like to know each time it is updated you can sign up to receive the blog using the Subscribe to service. This will ensure you are kept up to date on all that is being posted.

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What's coming up in 2009?
When I have been speaking at events or working with training organisations recently, people have been asking me what is happening on the blog in the first part of 2009.

Well, there is a lot to post about.

For example, there will be another success story fairly early in the New Year, plus more in the three questions series.

There will also be more about the TQS journey and a series of posts on the differences between Part A and Part B of the Training Quality Standard.

However, that is all for the future.

The next post will be early in the New Year. It's time for a holiday now!

Planning the TQS Development Journey (3) – Have you put your own house in order?

The FE sector understands initiatives.

There have been projects, awards, imperatives and opportunities to innovate in the sector for just about as long as anyone can remember.

Most of us who work in, or with, colleges and work-based learning provider organisations know how initiatives usually work.

• You have an idea.
• You find a champion, or a group of supporters.
• You obtain an amount of funding.
• You create a pilot project.
• You use the pilot project to refine your original plans.
• Finally – and somewhere along the line – you roll out a modified and must improved version of the original idea to the whole organisation.
  

If that’s how you’re planning to work with the TQS, there is one thing you can be certain of. Your journey will take a long time.

Why?

Two really important concepts, as far as the TQS is concerned, are consistency and standardisation.

In order to get consistency and standardisation in an organisation, you need systems and processes.

You need your systems and processes to be applied across your organisation. Then you need to track the use of those systems and processes so that you can be confident that they are being implemented.

You need to know, and to be able to demonstrate, that your approaches and ways of working are embedded into the life of your organisation.

Putting your own house in order – as far as the TQS is concerned – is about getting those systems and processes up and running as soon as possible.

You know, for example, that the system for establishing business benefits with employers when you come to discuss training solutions needs to be in place and operating quickly. Without this system in place you will not be able to generate evidence for parts of A2.

You also know that you need a mechanism for measuring the impact of the work you do with employers - actually with employers themselves. You need to be able to do this to help you to address A4 and, of course, A5.

Therefore, take some time to get these things set up now. It will save you time later on. It will also help you to be realistic about when you will be ready to seek certification.

Planning the TQS Journey (2) First things first

Now that you know what you do to help employers, you can begin to ask yourself the really important question.

What difference do your interventions make to employers?

If you did nothing would the employer be better off? You hope not, but how do you know?

Is the employer more profitable or, in the case of public sector organisations, is the organisation achieving more of its objectives, as a result of your interventions?

If you don’t know, you need to find out.

Set up the audit trail when you first begin to work with an employer.

Think about business benefits. When an employer chooses to work with you, what’s in it for the employer?

Think about key performance indicators – business performance indicators, that is.

It’s hard work establishing the right KPIs but you need to do this so that you’ll have something to write about when you get to the stage of working on your TQS application. You’ll need the answers to help you with A0 and A5.

Start working on these issues now.

Be prepared to work on your system for several months before you seek certification. You will need to show that you are actually identifying business benefits, setting performance indicators and measuring your success.

Planning the TQS Journey (1) What exactly are you trying to do to support employers?

Do you know?
Do your employers know?

Thank carefully about your answers, because those answers should be linked to what you know employers want.

I wrote about what employers want in an earlier post. You can re-read it here.

However, here’s what you need to do to help you to be clear about where you’re going.

Review what you currently say about how you support employers. (If you don’t have such a statement, then here’s your starting point.)

Remove everything from you statement that refers to: training, qualifications, courses, NVQ, Train to Gain, Apprenticeships, funding, skills . . . You get the picture.

Then remove any statements about helping employers to build a skilled workforce, or to meet their business objectives, or to solve their problems, or to become more profitable etc.

Why? Well, it’s aspirational and fuzzy and every one promises to do these things, so to get their business you need to do more – a lot more.

Stuck?

Here’s a clue. Those readers who have worked with us for quite a few years will remember our early How To Do More Business With Business programme. I used to say to anyone who asked me about it:

“We help colleges to do more business with business.”

It’s a simple statement.
It’s memorable. (People still quote it back to me.)
It encapsulates how we helped colleges then – and now.
It’s also the sort of thing the customer wants to hear, because it’s a statement about the benefits the customer will gain. It’s not about the products and services the provider can offer.

Employers want to hear about benefits they will gain, not what you can offer, when you talk to them.

So, December is a good time for strategic planning. Give some thought to the essence of what you do.

Write it down.

Work on your statement and refine it.

Succeed here, and you’ll also go a long way to preparing to write A0 in your TQS application.

Three Questions . . .

Three questions is a series of interviews in which I talk to experts who offer insights into how to address many of the issues provider organisations seeking TQS certification face.

Data strategy, measuring the impact of training solutions on employer organisations and dealing with trends in employer engagement are all issues that colleges and learning providers are grappling with as they progress towards TQS certification.

I asked David Willis, who helps organisations to use the data they collect to improve their business decisions, about how managers working to achieve the TQS can make sure they meet the data challenges posed by the Standard.

What sort of data should colleges and learning providers looking to gain TQS certification collect?

“You need to gather feedback on everything and track what goes on in your organisation. You need to gather information about your courses, your employers, your successes with employers, how you meet their expectations and so on.

This includes finding answers to the following:

How many employers do you support?
How many employees do you train?
What skills do employers ask for – that is individual employers and groups of employers?
Do you supply what they ask you for?
How happy are employers with your performance?
What additional skills do employers want you to help them to develop?

This is all valuable information. It’s the basis of your understanding of your employers. It’s part of your on-going market research.”

How can managers make progress with all this quickly?

“Think about producing a data strategy to help you to collect, and then make good use of, your data.

Your data strategy will set out what you want to achieve using the data you collect. It will also describe how you will do the job of collecting data. Having all this in place will help you to track what you do, to establish cycles of activity and to compare what you’ve done in the past with what you’re doing now.

For example, you know you need to gather employer feedback, so give some thought to that. Think about ways of collecting the feedback you need quickly and easily.

You could gather this data digitally by encouraging employers to log onto your system to leave their answers to your questionnaire. These responses can be analysed quickly. You can then appraise responses at a higher level – the level of the programme, the faculty or on a whole college basis. You can also think about what happened this year and last year.

You could set your system up so that you record what skills employers ask for when they come to you, and then check if they think you deliver what they want as part of your feedback process.

You’ll need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to help you to put all of this into practice. Most organisations in business have them now. You’ll need to think about how you intend to use the system and what you want it to do for you. This is part of your data strategy.

All of this is straightforward. It’s not difficult. You just need to think it through.”

How can managers justify the expense of such an approach to working with data to the most senior people in the organisation?

“Working with data in these ways is not just about helping you to get the TQS. It can also give you a competitive advantage in your marketplace.

With this work you’re building your understanding of employers. You’re undertaking highly specific research. You are getting to understand the local economy and local employers. You’re learning about the skills shortages in your area and about the demand for skills.

Your organisation needs that information. You need it for the TQS. You need it for your marketing.

Managers need to explain that working on your data and your data strategy will help you to gain the TQS. It will also help you to improve your overall performance with employers.”

If you would like more information about using your organisation’s data effectively contact David Willis via his website.

What next?

Several organisations I have been working with have recently achieved certification. I wrote a blog post about TTP back in October. There will be more interviews with organisations which have recently achieved certification following a period working with me over the coming weeks.

Now, however, as I start work with several new organisations, and at a time when a number of existing clients are looking to check their progress towards certification, the next series of blog posts will be about planning the TQS journey.

The series will take the form of questions about the things you really should be doing long before you start to write your application.

The first of these questions will be: do you know where you’re going?

It will focus on what exactly you are trying to do to support employers.

This series starts next week.

The next post, however, is another post in the Three Questions series.

Look out for that on Monday.

The Seven Strategies

Here are the seven strategies for success.

1. Plan for the future.
2. Make sure you understand employers.
3. Speak the right language.
4. Measure impact.
5. Look forward to your success.
6. Be clear about the differences between Part A and Part B.
7. Adopt a realistic timetable.

And the bonus strategy was: Make sure you are clear about the evidence you ask for.

Apply these strategies and you will make good progress on your TQS journey.

Your Route to TQS Certification (7) Adopt a realistic timetable.

“We must get the TQS within six months.”

I hear statements like this a lot. They tend to be followed by a series of reasons why the organisation must have the TQS soon.

They are rarely followed by statements about how time is going to be made in the busy life of the organisation to do the job properly.

A realistic timetable is one that ensures that the organisation sets up the right systems and processes to ensure that the developments it introduces work. It also allows time for these systems and processes to be shown to be working.

Consistency and standardisation are concepts that need to be borne in mind throughout the TQS journey.

• Do you do what you say you do?
• Do you do what you say you do – consistently?
• Do you work to clearly defined standards in terms of your performance?
• Can you demonstrate that, over time, you are working to these standards in a consistent manner?
  

Setting up the right systems is one thing. Demonstrating they work and are used – embedded in other words – is something else.

So, the final strategy for success is all about being realistic about how long your journey to certification will take.

Three Questions . . .

Three questions is a series of interviews with experts who offer insights into how to address the issues that slow down the progress of provider organisations looking to gain TQS certification.

Recently I spoke to Karen Kimberley, a specialist in making communications work better in large organisations, about how managers working to achieve the TQS can ensure they get the support they need from their organisation.

Some managers in colleges and provider organisations really struggle to get senior management backing for their work on the TQS. What do you suggest they do to ensure they get the support they need to succeed?

“Struggling to get senior management support is a common problem in organisations.

If you’re going to succeed with the TQS you need to manage your stakeholders carefully.

Telling senior managers, governors, other managers and colleagues, – all your stakeholders, in fact, – about the importance of the Training Quality Standard isn’t enough to ensure it will become important to them and move up their agenda. Senior managers don’t always listen or hear what you say and, as often as not, they’re not fully aware of the scope of the situation you are dealing with.

You need to find creative ways of showing how gaining the TQS will be a benefit to them and to your organisation. It’s really important that they understand these benefits, and it’s your job to help them.

You also need to help them to understand the size of the task you are working on. Maybe you could come up with a visual analogy. For example, create a picture which shows 150 steps leading to TQS certification. Explain to senior managers that each step in your picture equates to an hour of work. You can then show senior people where your organisation is on the stairway and how much effort you still need to put in to succeed.

You need to think hard about how to get your point across. Doing something like this will help you to engage your audience’s imagination and get them on board.”

How can the manager with responsibility for the TQS ensure he or she gets the right amount of support from every one in the organisation, not just senior managers?

“Organise a steering group.

Large organisations do this. They know where they’re going. They plan what they are going to do. They have milestones and timelines.

This approach means they are able to devolve many responsibilities to quite junior people. The tasks they will be asked to do are clear. People are working within a structure and aiming to achieve defined goals.

It’s also important that you take steps to keep your steering group posted about progress with the project. Use the web, and your intranet, to share information.

You could, for example, use Google Documents to share your plans, and your application as you are working on it. It’s better to do this than just send round drafts. All the people who share the Google Document can see the most up-to-date version. They can also add their input to it. This approach will help to keep people informed and enthusiastic.”

What single, important piece of advice would you like to offer to anyone leading a TQS project in a provider organisation or college to help them sustain commitment to the TQS?

“You need to involve people. That’s really important. Get them working with you.

Remember your success here depends on face-to-face communications, not solely on e-mails and documents.

If people are close to something, if they experience it, they understand it better. They need to experience what you are doing with the TQS if they are going to want to support you.

You must help them to be aware of what you are doing, to understand why the TQS matters and how they can get involved to help you. That way you will make progress quickly.”

Karen has provided a free planning guide to stakeholder communications which she is making available to readers of this blog. Contact her via her website if you would like a copy.

http://www.karenkimberley.co.uk

Success Stories

Success stories is a series of interviews with senior people in organisations which have achieved the Training Quality Standard

It offers insights into those organisations’ TQS development journeys and advice to organisations still working towards TQS certification.

I recently spoke to Paul Coxhead of Targeted Training Projects Ltd (TTP), the first company to gain TQS certification for Part B in logistics, about TTP’s success.

Tell me, Paul, what did you gain from the process of achieving the TQS?
“We formalised things.

When we first looked at the Standard we saw that we do all that it asks us to do, but that a lot of what we do wasn’t written down and structured.

I really liked the TQS from the start, because I saw it would give us recognition for the way we work with our customers.”

How difficult was the TQS assessment?
“Difficult.

The submission was hard. I thought we needed about four days to write the application. In the end it took us eleven. We were working on it right up to the deadline.

The assessment visit itself was great. The assessors were professional. They put staff at their ease. They knew what they had come to do.”

Do you think other providers should get involved with the TQS?
“Yes, yes, they should.

It will really sharpen you up as a company. We do more measuring of things now than we did. Staff had noticed we do. It’s also helpful to our employers. We help them to understand how the training we do is supporting their business.”

Do you think achieving the TQS will help your business?
“It’ll be great for business.

I accept it’ll be a slow burn. I think it will help us to retain our customers and get new ones.

The industry does talk, you know.

They’ll talk about TTP, and say there’s a provider who will help you to decide if the training is working. That’s good for us. It’s really valuable, in fact.”

Targeted Training Projects Ltd, a company which delivers tailored transport and logistics solutions to the logistics industry, has achieved the TQS in Part A and in Part B (Logistics). They are based in Kingswinford in the West Midlands.

Click here to visit TTP's website.

About the Achieving the TQS newsletter

This post is an information note for readers of the blog who do not currently receive my monthly Achieving the TQS newsletter.

If you would like to be added to the list of subscribers, go to the enquiry page on our website.

Just put the words: “Newsletter Request” in the message box on that page and remember to include your name and e-mail address with your request.

You’ll receive the next issue, which will be the November edition.

This issue will be celebrating the TQS successes of some of the organisations I have worked with which have gained certification recently.

The newsletter will be out about midway through the month.

Your Route to TQS Certification (6) Be clear about the differences between Part A and Part B

I recently reviewed an application where I started to have a sense of déjà vu when I reached B0.

It wasn’t a mistake. The text in B0 was exactly the same as what had been written in A0.

This provider, like quite a few organisations preparing for TQS certification, hadn’t really thought through the differences between Part A and Part B of the standard.

There is a difference.

• Part A deals with employers as individual customers and how the provider organisation responds to them. This could mean responding to local employers. It could be responding to large employers, small employers, public sector employers, private sector employers and so on.

• Part B deals with how the provider works with a specified sector, and how the organisation develops and then deploys and delivers support to a sector. This means thinking about the expectations of the relevant sector skills council and being familiar with its “footprint”. It also means trying to demonstrate a local, regional and national perspective on developments within the defined sector.
  

Writing about the two different employer groups will be easier if you think about horizontal and vertical slices in the employer marketplace as you write.

Part A looks across the whole spectrum of employers and so can be seen as the horizontal slice.

Part B is the vertical slice, looking up and down a specific sector.

When the organisation I mentioned at the beginning of the post reworked its application the managers wrote about broadly the same issues in Part A and in Part B but the perspective from which the “story” was written was different. The managers used horizonal and vertical perspectives.

That also led to the organisation writing about different approaches and, of course, the two parts of the application then highlighted different results.

Your Route to TQS Certification (5) Look forward to your success

Be clear about this.

You are going to succeed with the TQS. You are going to progress smoothly, overcoming obstacles, working systematically and achieving your certification.

Therefore, take a moment now to look forward to the time when you have achieved your goal.

• What will be different in your organisation?
• What will have changed?
• What will you want to tell the world about how you have improved?

Take some time to think about this and write down your answers. Make a list of the successes you will have achieved by the time you gain TQS certification.

Now review your list, because it’s an important list for several reasons.

First, you’ve just drawn attention to the successes you want your organisation to achieve as a result of your TQS certification. Doing this means you have focused on your goals.

Second, you now know what you are going to put on your website and in your newsletters once you have gained the TQS.

Third, and probably most important of all, you have identified the benefits you need to promote incessantly to the senior team in your organisation to help to maintain their commitment to the TQS project.

So, make sure you draw up that list . . . and keep on dreaming about the future.

Your Route to TQS Certification (4) Measure impact

Measuring the impact of training interventions has been one of the challenges facing every one looking to achieve certification since the TQS was introduced.

With conditional certifications still being awarded it’s clear that measuring the impact of training remains a challenge.

The advice out there exhorts people to identify, at the outset, the outcomes training will deliver, and the measures to be used to establish outcomes. This seems straightforward advice, but quite a few people still struggle.

Measuring the impact of training interventions on employee productivity is the easiest way to begin. Think about:

1. Learner (Employee) Achievement


2. Leading to Enhanced Employee Performance


3. Quantified via Performance Measures and Indicators.
   

Use expected learner achievements as the starting point from which you will measure enhanced employee performance. Work with the employer to establish these outcomes and the key performance indicators of success before the training takes place.

And the measures to use?

I use five different types. Three to try out are:

• Employee productivity - for example, getting more done
  
• Employee efficiency - for example, working faster, reducing errors and error rates
  
• Employee flexibility - for example, multi-tasking.

You won’t need to worry about being able to answer the questions employers ask about how your training will help them. If you have your list of measures and improvements in mind when you first start the dialgoue, you will be in a strong position.

If you plan your interactions with employers, and show that you know how to measure the impact of your interventions, employers will be more likely to want to work with you.

When this happens you will be well on the way to TQS certification.

A Bonus Strategy

Does your TQS application look like this?

Well, I hope not.

Last week in an organisation that doesn’t need me to remind its managers of what happened, we drew together all the evidence that people had sent over to the application writing team.

There were so many folders and guides and reports we had difficulty in getting into the room. We certainly couldn’t see each other across the table where we were working.

We decided to measure the depth of the paperwork that the team was being asked to go through and to use to help with the application.

I’ve added up all the figures.

If all the pieces of paper were piled on top of each other, each of the four people on the application writing team would have a pile of documents like the one above to work through.

So, here’s the bonus strategy for success.

When you ask for help with evidence gathering, be quite specific about what you say you want. Otherwise you could end up with a pile like the one we ended up with at ………… (Your secret is safe!)

Your Route to TQS Certification (3) Speak the right language

I regularly hear staff working in colleges and in provider organisations struggling to communicate with employers, especially private sector employers.

I hear people telling employers about Train to Gain, NVQ and diplomas and using the FE jargon that they understand so well and which is of little or no interest to their listeners.

The result: frustration on both sides, – and all too often a decision on the part of employers to avoid further contact with the FE sector.

If you’re going to make a success of working with employers – showing your responsiveness and demonstrating your understanding of the particular sectors in which you have expertise – then you need to speak the language of employers.

Their language is easy to understand.

Employers want to hear about three things:

1. how you will help them to make more money, or if they are in the public sector, how you will help them to achieve their objectives
   


2. how you will help them to keep more of their money, or to save money by working more efficiently
   
   and, a long, long way down the list of priorities:
   


3. how you will help them to improve their personal skills and abilities and their professional standing.

Therefore, the real task for every one trying to build up good working relationships with employers, and along the way to progress towards Training Quality Standard certification, is to talk to employers in their language, not in the language of education, skills, learning, qualifications etc.

So think about how you promote your programmes and qualifications to employers.

Discard everything you would normally say about learning and development and practise explaining to employers how your offer will help them with the first two points above.

This, more than almost anything else, will help you to be more in tune with employers and their concerns and to speak the right language when you meet them.

Your Route to TQS Certification (2) Make sure you understand employers

It’s a simple strategy and one that is often overlooked, ignored or just forgotten.

How can you be responsive to employers if you don’t know:

1. what keeps them awake at night
2. what they consider to be their problems and concerns
3. their aspirations and goals?

Equally how can you claim to be serving a sector if you’re not familiar with the issues employers working in that sector are facing?

You need to understand the employer’s business before you can start to recommend training solutions, because until you have that understanding there’s not much common ground on which the two of you can stand.

Talk to employers. Get to know them. Ask them how the credit crunch is affecting their business. Ask them if they are worried about the downturn in the economy. Get on their wavelength. They’ll be far more likely to want to work with you if they are confident you understand them.

This strategy will help you to build you business. It’s also an approach that will help you towards Training Quality Standard certification.

Remember, if you take steps to find out where the employers you want to work with are feeling the pain, you just might get the opportunity to help them to do something about it.

Your Route to TQS Certification (1) Plan for the Future

Achieving the Training Quality Standard is important to you and to your organisation, but it is only a milestone on your journey to success.

You are looking, over the medium term, to develop your business with employers. You are looking to do more work with employers and you’re looking to build relationships with employers.

This means you need a plan.

Some organisations immediately say they have a plan. It usually turns out to be a business profile with income targets. That is, it’s full of the sort of information that is of interest within their organisation, but has no place in front of employers.

What you need is a real plan, a document that says how you intend to help employers. You need a document which explains how you intend to support employers as they seek to make a profit, meet their objectives and survive in difficult times. You need a plan that is clear about your role in their success.

If you have that sort of plan, then you will be able to write about your strategy for supporting employers (A0) easily, and your strategy for supporting a sector, or sectors, (B0) with confidence.

Thus, your first strategy for success is a broad business development strategy and one that will help you to be more successful overall, as well as leading you closer to TQS certification.

The five big mistakes

Here are the five big mistakes providers make when they start to write their Training Quality Standard applications.

1. Running out of time
2. Underestimating the job
3. What, no team!
4. Writing for the wrong audience
5. Failing to follow the guidance.
   

Make one of these mistakes and it can harm your application.

Make more than one mistake and you could find you are seriously off course.

Use this post as an aide memoire for when you are writing your application. Avoid all five big mistakes if you can.

So what comes after the five big mistakes?

Now is the time to step back and think about planning the route to certification and to identify strategies that will help to you achieve success.

There are seven of them. What comes next are seven strategies to help you to make progress towards TQS certification.

Failing to follow the guidance – big mistake number five

The last of the big mistakes is one that no one needs to make.

When I am asked to review Training Quality Standard applications, I am always amazed at the number of documents sent to me which have clearly been produced without reference to the application writing guidance.

The Assessment Guide and Evidence Framework document is an excellent support to the whole TQS application writing process, as are the Part B support documents produced by the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs). Managers writing an application should use these documents to guide their work throughout the time they are writing their submissions.

However, in many cases – and probably in the majority of applications that I see – people have written what they think they should write, rather than using the published guidance to help them to be clear about what to include in their applications and what to omit.

As a result they just don’t cover the issues that need to be addressed, or they cover them badly, or they include lots of material that just isn’t relevant.

Remember, you don’t have to make this mistake.

It’s probably the easiest of the five big mistakes to avoid. . .

. . . so, make sure you follow the instructions . . . and avoid this particular problem.

Writing for the wrong audience – big mistake number four

Just who are you writing the TQS application for? Think carefully about the question because the answer will shape your whole submission.

Are you writing with the audience for your self-assessment report in mind? Are you writing for OFSTED? Are you writing for the LSC, or for another funding agency? Are you writing for nobody and no one, and just aiming to get through the job as quickly as possible?

If you write your submission primarily for any of these groups, you are writing for the wrong audience.

If you are going to write a good application, you need to think carefully about your audience. In this case, you are writing for the lead assessor, the person who will manage your TQS assessment and who will be your main contact with the assessment process.

As you write consider this person’s situation, and what he or she needs to find in your application. Put yourself in the lead assessor’s shoes, and think about what you would like to read.

You know that the lead assessor will want to gain an understanding of your organisation and what you do, so make sure this is clearly stated.

You know the lead assessor wants to undertake a scoring activity, so make sure you write clearly. Give him or her as much help as possible, by dealing with what is asked for in each section of the application.

You know the lead assessor will be visiting your site, and only has your application to help him or her to prepare, so make sure you include everything you want the assessment team to be aware of, before they arrive.

Avoid this big mistake by taking time to craft an application that is written with a clear purpose and for a defined audience. Your application will be stronger and more coherent if you follow this advice.

As a result you will understand your own organisation better, too.

Can you outsource the writing of your TQS application?

Before I deal with the final two big mistakes that organisations make when they’re preparing their TQS application, I thought I’d deal with a question that people ask again and again. It’s the question about who writes the application.

The question is really about if you can offload the whole job onto someone else, preferably someone outside your organisation?

It does happen. I’ve already been asked to write a Part A application on at least four occasions.

But does it work? Well, it depends. . .

If you want to hand over the whole job to someone else, – a bid writer, a copywriter, a consultant, anyone who will take the job away - the application produced probably won’t present your organisation as well as it might.

However, if you take the advice in the previous post, and appoint a project manager from inside your organisation, then get some people collecting the evidence that is going to make up the meat of the application and have someone ready to review and edit and revise the document – then, maybe.

Keeping the whole job in-house must make most sense, but if you really are struggling with the writing, getting someone who likes to write on your team could help you with the task and make life a little bit easier for you.

Just don’t think that you can hand the job over to someone outside your organisation and forget about it.

There’s more to the TQS application than that.

What, no team! – big mistake number three

You do have an application writing team, don’t you?

If you haven’t, you’re making one of the five big mistakes that people writing their Training Quality Standard (TQS) application make.

This is because producing a sound TQS application is a big job. In fact, it’s a job for a team.

You need at least two people in that team, but if you have the capacity in your organisation, you will make a better job of the application by bringing more people into the application writing activity.

Four is a good number to aim for, because there are four principal roles to be filled when you are producing your application. These are:

the principal writer – the person who writes the text of the application;
the principal reviewer – the person who reads what has been written and who tries to read it as an assessor might. He or she looks for inconsistencies and contradictions, omissions and inaccuracies and then gives feedback on the application to the principal writer;
the principal evidence gatherer – the person with a real in-depth knowledge of the organisation who can find the right examples of practice to fit into the different parts of the application;
the project manager – the senior person who makes sure that the team has the time and space to do the job well and who fights the battles with the most senior managers to ensure that application writing has priority in the team’s timetable. This is also the person who, in the end, decides when the application is ready to be submitted.

Team responsibilities will be divided up in ways which make sense to you because you know where the talents of the people in your organisation lie.

However, you must ensure that the principal writer and the principal reviewer are different people.

Remember that getting a team on the job of application writing will make the task easier.

Getting a team on the job will also make the application that is sent off to the assessment body better – so it’s worth doing.

Underestimating the job – big mistake number two

Writing a Training Quality Standard (TQS) application takes time, but it is also a task that needs careful planning.

The second big mistake people make when writing their application is to underestimate the size, scope and scale of the job itself and as a result plan the application writing badly.

Ask a plumber, a carpenter or a removal man about estimating and how important a task it is. Any one of these people will tell you that if you get the estimate wrong the whole job goes awry.

You don’t have the right amount of resource. You don’t have the right number of people. You don’t allocate the right amount of time to the job. The result is a mess.

It’s the same with the TQS.

Mis-estimate the job and you might decide you don’t need to write an application from scratch. You might decide you can cut and paste bits from your most recent self-assessment report or from a tender you have produced.

Mis-estimate the job and you’re also likely to think that one person can research the application and write it up, possibly over a couple of days, or maybe over a weekend.

These are big mistakes.

In fact, writing a good TQS application requires a structured approach, a commitment to gather good evidence and a willingness to spend time on building a case about how you address the specific requirements of the different parts of the Standard.

Mis-estimate the job, or if we’re being honest, underestimate the job, and you’ll be making the best you can of things without the right tools and with the wrong allocation of resource.

To avoid this big mistake accept that your TQS application is a new document. It’s a document that will take time to research and to write, and it needs a team working on it.

To avoid this big mistake, take care with your estimates.

Running out of time – big mistake number one

There’s something you can do, and do easily, that can have a catastrophic impact on your Training Quality Standard application. It’s a big mistake, possibly the biggest of all, and it’s one from which it is almost impossible to recover.

It’s the mistake of allowing yourself to run out of time.

When you begin to think about writing your application you’re probably relatively relaxed. Writing your organisation’s application might be a big task but, as you tell yourself at this stage, you have weeks in which to do the job . . . and a week is a long time.

Yet, the hours and the days and the weeks are eaten up. There are other priorities, emergencies, and all sorts of calls on your time. Before you know where you are, you are running out of time, and you still have the application to write.

Of course, when you realise what’s happening, you start writing, but by now you’ve lost a lot of the available time. In some cases you might only be a few days away from the submission deadline. For some people this realisation means they end up writing right up to the last minute.

This approach doesn’t help you to write a good application.

Get things right when you come to write your application. Start early. Create a writing schedule. Get a draft done quickly. Leave yourself time – and lots of it – to review and to rewrite.

Do all of these things and you’ll avoid big mistake number one.

Welcome to this blog

If you already know what the TQS is, and you’re interested in achieving it, then this is definitely a blog for you. Welcome!

If you’re new to the TQS – the Training Quality Standard – then you’re also welcome.

There’s a lot of interest in the TQS in the UK right now. Further education colleges, learning providers and, more recently, Higher Education organisations, are working with it and looking to become certificated.

I spend my time helping organisations in the post-compulsory education world to become more business-focused and more business-orientated and, yes, doing what they need to do to achieve the TQS.

Finding the right place to start with the TQS is a challenge. Perhaps the place to begin is with the standard itself. Perhaps you’d like to hear about how to manage the development journey leading to assessment. Perhaps, and perhaps not.

What I find that people really want to know about are the problems, potential disasters and pitfalls. That’s why I’m starting the blog by dealing with the five biggest mistakes people make when they’re writing their applications for assessment – and, of course, I’ll be offering some guidance on how to avoid them.

Come back soon to see what these mistakes are.

Come back soon to ensure you avoid making them yourself.