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.

Employer Engagement Basics - the Summary

Over the past few weeks I've been writing about employer engagement basics.

This series of posts offers a good starting point if you want to make sure you set up the right systems and pay attention to the right things. The series will also help you if you want to check that you are doing the right things.

The series started by covering the key elements of:

the employer engagement strategy

Next there was some guidance on:

organisational needs analyses

including a post on why you need an organisational needs analysis.

I wrote about LMI in a post entitled: What's all this about LMI?

I also answered the question: how much LMI do we need?

I wrote about measuring the impact of training and also about continuous improvement.

Use the series as a source of basic guidance and as a means of benchmarking your progress with your work with employers to date.

Attract more business - the blog

I've added a new blog to my list of blogs.

It's called: Attract more business. You can access it by clicking on the blog name or via the blog roll on the right hand side of the page.

This blog has a broader focus than Achieving the TQS. It looks at how to do a lot more business with employers.

I've noted the key themes that the blog will be covering in a post today.

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement comes up sooner or later in every development programme.

If you’ve been following the series of posts on employer engagement basics, you will have found quite a few areas where you can improve what you currently do to support employers.

In the context of continuous improvement it’s important to record the detail of your systems and processes for supporting employers. You also need to show how you change your processes for managing your work with employers. When you make these changes you are creating a case study of how you manage the continuous improvement process.

Don’t worry, then, that you have four versions of your ONA and three versions of the approach you use to measuring the impact of your interventions in employer organisations. You’re demonstrating incremental development via each iteration. You’re showing how you are adapting your work to be more employer-responsive. You’re showing you want to serve your market more effectively.

If you’re looking to measure your improvement as well as describing it in narrative terms, think about the performance measures you have identified for your organisation. Remember these are not your targets. They are the measures you are using, your own key performance indicators (KPI). They could relate to employer satisfaction. They could relate to productivity issues and how you are helping employers to improve their ability to do what they do.

Do the trends you have noted show an improvement? Are you able to demonstrate that more employers believe you are helping them to improve their business, for example?

If they do, and if you have the numerical information to prove it, you are on your way to demonstrating continuous improvement.

Measuring Impact

It’s all very well to talk about measuring the impact of your work with employers, but what, exactly, do you need to measure?

The answer is all to do with what you are trying to achieve for the employer, rather than for learners.

How have the training interventions you have delivered, or are delivering, helped the employer’s organisation?

What difference is your training making to the organisation’s success?

You must work out what you are trying to achieve before you begin working with the employer.

After you have completed your interventions you must go back and measure how well you did.

When you think about measurement, what sort of things should you be measuring?

The easiest way to get started is to think about improvements to employee productivity.

• What can employees do now that they couldn’t do before the training?


• What can employees do faster and making fewer mistakes than previously?


• What improvements in employees’ performance can you see in the areas which were covered by the training you delivered?
  

Talk to the employer about these subjects. The chances are you will find that this sort of thinking leads on to discussions about other improvements.

Does the employer think that employees are performing more effectively now they have completed their training?

Is there a sense of improved morale and motivation in the employer’s organisation?

Can every one see what difference your interventions have made?

If they can you have begun to measure impact.