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.