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.