Good Questions (4) - What did you gain as a result of working with us?

I went out on some visits to employers last week. I was accompanying a Business Development Manager from a learning provider organisation.

Whilst we were at one employer organisation, he asked the question:

“What did gain from working with us?”

The answer he received was:

“We got some free training.”

I felt sorry for that manager, and wouldn’t have liked to have been in his shoes when he reported back to his senior team about his own organisation's readiness to go forward to TQS certification.

Yet, the exchange illustrates an important point.

You need to help the employer to be clear about what he or she is going to gain from working with you before you begin a programme. If you do that, the employer can be looking out for those benefits during the life of the training programme.

I was in a different employer organisation recently where the answer to the same question was:

“As a result of the SAFED training we have reduced our fuel consumption by 2%, so despite the fact that diesel prices are going up again, we are spending about the same on fuel as we were three months ago.”

How would you feel if your employer customers said this?

I know the account manager sitting next to me in that meeting was grinning from ear to ear for the rest of the day.

Remember then, that is you want your employers to see the benefits of working with you, you need to help them to know what they will get out of working with you before the training begins.

Employers won’t make statements like the one from the owner of the transport company above, unless you set them on the right track to begin with.

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?
  

Good Questions (2)

The second good question in our April Newsletter is: Are your staff familiar with the SSC’s footprint?

Unpacking this one is helpful for anyone thinking about starting on a Part B application.

It’s truly amazing how often I see an application where the writer is unaware of what the relevant Sector Skills Council is trying to do to support its sector.

Given that Part B focuses on how the organisation works to support the development of the relevant sector, it’s impossible to write a good Part B application without knowing about what is happening in that sector.

A good starting point with all of this is to find out what the SSC is doing – what its footprint is. Then it’s worth finding out what the key trade organisations are looking to achieve. Next ask: who is lobbying government about what? That will help with the national perspective.

Then there are the regional, sub-regional and local perspectives on the industry. The person writing your application needs to know about these, too.

Once you are confident about where the sector is going, it’s possible to start to write about what you are doing to help the sector.

What do people write about instead?
Well, when they struggle, they write about how they work with their individual employers and about what they do in general terms. It’s sad, because so many providers do know their sectors well and senior staff in successful providers are often very active in their industries. They simply don’t write what will show their achievements off well.

More than once, a provider has admitted to running out of steam by the time they have reached Part B.

• Sometimes, the person writing Part B hasn’t had any training on what the application process requires.
• Sometimes the person writing Part B is doing so without having seen the Applicant Guide.

If you’re going to make a good showing with Part B, make sure you can answer this good question with confidence. That’s your starting point with your Part B work.

Good Questions (1)

Good questions are good for your organisation. They can be challenging, but good questions will help you to focus on the right issues.

In the April edition of the Achieving the TQS Newsletter I set out five good questions that it would be beneficial for you to ask in your organisation as your work towards your TQS certification.

I said in the newseltter that I would look at each question in more detail in this blog. Therefore, the next few posts deal with those questions in turn.

When you look at each question, before you think about the answer, think about the value of asking the question. Then think about the answer.

This first question is one to ask of the employer.

What briefing did you receive about the work we are doing with you?

It’s far better to talk to people who have been briefed than simply to look to check if there is a system in place to ensure that briefings to take place.

• Having a monitoring system is part of your management process.


• Implementing a monitoring system is part of your management process.


• Proving that the monitoring system works as specified is a valuable activity.


• Talking to your employers about this not only allows you to check the efficacy of your system, it helps you to build your relationship with each employer.

People in colleges and provider organisations often say they need more reasons to get in touch with employers in order to build rapport and to understand employers better. Here is one question that can start a conversation and help you to do just that.

You also need to speak to the employer about the briefing that he or she has received, because it’s the employer’s judgement that counts. You may think your communications system works well. You can’t be sure of that, until it is endorsed by your employers.

The meaning of all communication is found in the message received, not in the message sent, so your employers’ perceptions really matter.

Some providers introduce convoluted checking systems to work out in they’re doing what they set out to do. They often forget that asking a simple question can make life a lot simpler and can be just as good - or better - than those checks at providing the information you need.

The answer to this question gives confirmation that an important part of your process for working with employers works. Therefore, remember to ask it.