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.