GQA Qualifications Blog

Thursday 8 December 2011

Have you Considered - A bit on the side?


I thought the title might get your attention, however it is not what you think!

Have you considered the real reasons that we deliver NVQs? For some it may be one of the following:

  • · To help a candidate gain a qualification
  • · To help a candidate to get a CSCS card
  • · To train and assess and apprentice
  • · Because you have funding to use
  • · Because a company contacted you

However one of the side effects of learners gaining a qualification is to improve how a company works, to improve their health and safety, improve or develop work processes, improve productivity or teamwork.

Hence the bit on the side - a by-product of qualifying and developing staff is that the company can see some real (b)usiness (i)mprovement occurring through (t)echniques that their candidates have developed through undertaking their qualification.

Do you ever ask the companies you work with how having qualified staff has helped them to improve or develop their business. As I am sure that if you asked them they could give you some examples of how it has helped them. If you have some good examples of how having their staff gain a qualification has improved their business let GQA know as we would like to publish it in our newsletter.

Also if you have some good testimonials it could help you to sell NVQs to new customers, especially if you can show tangible results for a company.

If your customers are not seeing improvements in their business, perhaps a change in approach to assessment is needed. Are you really developing the learners or just ticking the boxes?

To encourage others to use NVQs in their business they need a reason to – tell them about the benefits, and the bit on the side.

Martin Sadler (GQA)