Meeting employers’ needs –
The new standard

By Sue Peake, Regional Skills Development Director, Learning and Skills Council (LSC) East Midlands

The most important element of any business, whether it is a large multi-national or a sole trader, has to be its people. For employers and businesses to be competitive, productive and profitable, they need a competent, reliable, workforce who are skilled and confident in their work.

Businesses therefore need to ensure all their employees receive high quality training delivered at the right time, at the right level and within budget – not an easy task for today’s busy managers to provide or to resource.

Just one of the ways in which the LSC is helping employers is by introducing the new standard, so employers can be sure that the training provider they choose is one they can trust.

The new standard is a voluntary assessment framework for training providers, which highlights excellence in the two areas that employers say are most important to them; namely provider responsiveness to employer needs and provider excellence in a particular vocational area.

Derby College is one of the first 26 training providers from across the country to be accredited with the new standard and the first in the East Midlands

Corporate College, part of Derby College, delivers training in a number of sectors from Care & Counselling, Cleaning, Construction, Hospitality and Manufacturing to IT, Management, Retail and Skills for Life.

It aims through its training packages to help organisations and businesses gain the competitive advantage, to ensure teams work more effectively, customer service levels improve and ultimately enable them to maintain and win more business.

With more then 450 employers taking on the College’s training packages and 94% of last year’s clients stating the training was “very good or excellent”, the College certainly deserves the new accreditation.

One well known name using the College’s training packages is Argos. The company’s Barton-under-Needwood distribution centre wanted to raise general and specialist skills levels among its staff.

Pat Middleton, Argos Site Trainer at Barton-under-Needwood says:

“Argos has been working with Corporate College since 2006. Since then nearly 70 employees at our distribution centre in Barton-under-Needwood have gained nationally recognised qualifications, ranging from NVQ Warehousing and Distribution, which is specific to many employees’ job roles, to more generic qualifications in Literacy and IT.“

“The training has given the team members more confidence to do their jobs by providing them with new skills and qualifications to prove their competence and we are currently rolling out an ongoing continuous improvement initiative. The Business Improvement Techniques, NVQ in particular, has helped in sustaining and performing all of the processes to achieve a more efficient work environment.“

“Corporate College has been very keen to meet our needs in offering learning resources that relate to our working environment and their commitment to ensuring the programmes they deliver meets both the individuals’ and the company’s requirements. Our training team meets regularly with the team from Corporate College to ensure everything is running smoothly and to check learners’ progress so we’ve developed a strong and successful working relationship with the College which we plan to build on in the future.”

Training is essential to any successful business and we are determined to make high quality skills training accessible for all employers and employees. The creation of a credible national mark, which employers can recognise, will result in numerous benefits to both employers and providers such as increasing the quality of training provision and decreasing the costs of sourcing training, while encouraging employers to invest more in training. The benefits to the employee learner include quality, targeted training to suit their desired needs, particular to their sector.

The new standard provides a voluntary assessment framework for training providers. It accredits organisations for responsiveness to employers, excellence in delivering training, commitment to continuous improvement and specialisation around industry sectors. Its creation is intended to raise confidence amongst employers as those who train say a successful standard will encourage them to arrange more training overall, especially with external provision. It also has the potential to reduce costs for employers by saving time and money in making decisions as high quality providers can be easily identified.

To date, more than 50 training providers have applied for the standard including colleges, universities, commercial and publicly funded training organisations, and several large employers. Feedback from training providers involved to date has also been positive. Almost all reported that the process of going through the standard had sharpened their approach to working with employers and demonstrated to them where they need to make changes to better meet the needs of employers.

Ensuring the training on offer most fully meets the needs of employers is our overall objective and, building on the success of Derby College, we want their achievement to encourage other training providers to follow. We are currently working with a number of existing LSC providers and hope to see many more accredited in the future. We would strongly recommend all training providers from across the region come forward to register.

Awareness events are being held across the region for training providers to visit and find out more. The next one in the East Midlands is in Nottingham on 11 February and again on 6 March. Training providers interested in becoming accredited should visit www.newstandard.co.uk.