Get a grip!

This could be the sub-title to most of the presentations that I make to colleges and learning providers about the TQS.

People who are just starting out on the TQS journey often don’t know where to start with employer engagement.

They don’t know which are the activities they need to do quickly.

Defining how you work with employers early in your TQS development process is essential if you are going to progress rapidly. It will also add value to your employer engagement activities.

One of the employer engagement basics, then, is to think about how you manage the relationship with individual employers.

To help to be clear about how you work with employers consider the stages of the employer's journey with you. Think about:

• The time before employers do business with you – when they are making enquiries and you are dealing with them
• When they are considering working with you – that is when you are creating an offer and a way of working with them
• When they are working with you – when the programme they have “purchased” is progressing
• When the first piece of work comes to an end – when you work out with each employer just how well you have supported him or her (not how well you have supported the learners)
• When you come to build the relationship further – when you think about how you can turn a single piece of business into a long-term relationship.

You need to have systems and processes in place for managing each stage of the employer’s journey.

You also need to make sure those systems and processes are implemented consistently across your organisation. (If you don’t work in a consistent manner you will have problems when you come to think about assessment.)

All of this could sound like a big piece of work.

It is, but it’s a relatively simple and straightforward piece of work, if you do it sooner rather than later.

Your Organisational Needs Analysis

At the heart of your employer engagement strategy is your approach to finding out exactly what makes employer organisations tick.

• You want to know what their issues are.
• You want to know what keeps people in employer organisations awake at night.
• You want to know the problems they are wrestling with.

You want to know this because until you know these things, you cannot possibly know what training to offer employers.

Your ONA is at the heart of your commitment to being demand-led.

Therefore, do you have one?
Do you use it?
Do you aggregate the outputs you receive from individual employers to help you to obtain a better view of your marketplace?

If you are just starting to think about ONAs, produce something very simple and straightforward.

Think of ways in which you can add value to the employer via your ONA.

Remember employers are giving you their valuable time. What will the employer get out of the ONA, on the day, immediately?

Make a list of benefits.

Check that employers think these are benefits, too.

Your ONA is vital to your success with employers. It must be perceived as being valuable by employers, so work on this building block of employer engagement as soon as is practicable.

Even in you already have an ONA, review it and check that it is fit for purpose.

Check also that employers think your ONA is fit for putpose.

The Employer Engagement Strategy

Do you have an employer engagement strategy?

When I visit provider organisations the employer engagement strategy I am presented with is often the business plan.

It’s great to have a plan, but your employer engagement strategy needs both an internal face and an external face.

In simple terms, if your business plan is the internal face of your employer engagement strategy, the external face is your rationale for working with employers.

The external face is your series of statements which set out what you aim to do support employers. It’s also the set of statements you make about how you do this.

It’s that simple.

These statements need to be communicated to your staff and repeated to your employers and your stakeholders.

You will know your employer engagement strategy has been understood when your employers start telling you what you aim to do to support them and they offer you the messages you have promoted to them.

What goes wrong?
Quite a few organisations don’t really know how they help employers, so they can’t create those public statements. They don’t have an external face to their employer engagement strategy.

Check your situation. Ask three of your staff now:

What do we do to help employers? . . . . . . . .

Employer Engagement Basics

The next few posts are about employer engagement.

If you are new to the TQS, use them to help you to get started on your development journey.

If you are approaching assessment, use them to help you to check your progress and your readiness to be certificated.

News about resources

There are some updates to our website that you may find interesting.

I have updated our Twenty Things To Do Before You Apply for Assessment Against The Training Quality Standard.

This report has become quite famous. I'm regularly asked about the "Twenty Things" document. Well, now there are twenty-five things to do before you make that application.

You might also be interested in another of our reports. This one is about using modern marketing techniques to sell training solutions to employers. It's called: A New Blueprint For Selling To Employers.

Both documents are pdfs and both can be downloaded now from the resources page on our website.

Good Questions (5) How often do we keep in touch with our employers?

This is the last of the five good questions that I introduced in our April newsletter.

How often do you keep in touch with your employers is an interesting question.

• Is there a hard-and-fast rule?
• Is there a right answer?
• Is there an answer that satisfies the TQS requirements?

The only answer is the one that is linked to employers’ requirements and expectations.

• How often do your employers want you to be in touch?
• Can your systems cope with employers who have different expectations?
• Can your systems cope with employers who want ad hoc contact?
• Can your systems cope with employers who want contact to be triggered by particular events and not by the calendar?

An interesting additional question is:

• How do you know what employers want and expect?

Asking good questions is an excellent way of helping you to progress. Use these five as you work towards TQS certification.