A Deadline is Looming

As the start of the autumn term approaches the final opportunity to gain conditional TQS certification also approaches.

The current guidance is that conditional certification will end in December 2009. If, by the end of the year, you have not registered your organisation to be assessed, you won’t be able to gain conditional certification. You’ll have to gain full TQS certification if you want to be certificated.

Before the term even begins this deadline means that managers in some provider organisations are panicking.

Try to avoid this. Step back. Make a judgement about your current readiness to gain the TQS, and the likelihood of your needing to rely on gaining conditional certification.

Consider your answers to the following.

Do you have a customer/employer journey?
Have you set down what happens to employers from the time when they first make contact with you to the time when you can be reasonably confident that they have a long-term relationship with you?

Have you thought about:

• first contact with your organisation
• the matching and contracting process
• the period when an employer is doing business with you
• what happens at the end of a piece of work
• how you build on-going relationships with individual employers?

Do you have systems and processes in place to help you to manage the customer/employer journey?
Have you flow-charted what happens, or documented it in some way that allows you to communicate your approach to your staff?

Are you operating a system of organisational needs analysis that leads to the production of business-focused proposals?
Central to the way in which you manage your work with employers is the way you set up the relationship. Can you demonstrate you do think about helping the employer’s organisation as well as thinking about how you help learners?

Are you sure your training interventions really do help employers? Can you demonstrate that you do check, after a training intervention, just how well you have supported the employer?

Are you building relationships with employers for the future?
Have you a system for managing the on-going relationship with employers and building that relationship over time?
Are you measuring your successes with employers?
Are you thinking about the impact of what you do to support employers?

What are you doing about consistency and standardisation issues?
Whatever systems and processes you set up, are you making sure they are adhered to? Are you making sure that the employer always gets at least a defined minimum level of service and, yes, do you have service standards against which you measure your performance?

Make an assessment of your current situation. How much more do you need to do before you will be ready to seek certification?

If you still have a long way to go, work out how long it will be before you believe you are ready to be certificated. Make a judgement. Is the December 2009 deadline relevant to your situation?

Carry on with your development work and check your progress at the end of October.

Then think about how much more activity you will be able to undertake in the six weeks between the beginning of November and the middle of December.

This analysis will help you to be clear of whether the ending of conditional certification is something that affects you, or whether this is a deadline you can afford to ignore.