Good Questions (3)

In our April Newsletter there were five good questions. Here is some more guidance about the third of them.

Did you produce a proposal for the employer that dealt with business benefits?

If you think you did, the question is: are you sure?

A lot of the proposals that I see are not really business-focused. They deal essentially with training and training issues. This causes problems when you come to think about the Training Quality Standard.

If you don’t have proposals which cover the right things, you will struggle to address the requirements of 2.4 in the TQS. If you struggle with 2.4, you will struggle with 4.1. You will almost certainly struggle with aspects of A5, too.

Your proposals to employers are the bedrock of your practice. They are essential elements of your work with employers.

Don’t spend too much time thinking about how nice they look, how prettily they are laid out and if they are all written down. Think carefully about how your interventions will help the employer’s business. That’s what is essential in a good proposal.

This is a simple requirement, but it causes lots of problems.

It also takes time to rectify.

If your proposals don’t deal with business benefits, then you can’t create an audit trail which shows that you have done what you set out to do. You can’t show that your employers are benefiting from working with you.

This is one of the main reasons why you need to chip away at your TQS work over time.

You need to embed systems and processes and implement them for long enough to show that they work.

Therefore, when you think about this question, also ask:

• How long will it take us to ensure we do address business benefits in employer organisations?
• How long after that will we need to wait in order to prove that we are adding value to our employers as well as to our learners?