Following the successful rollout of the Training Quality Standard for training providers, the Standard has been developed to offer assessment and certification to the same requirements, for training delivered by employers’ in-house departments. The development of the Training Quality Standard for Employers is a crucial step in the Standard’s long-term evolution, ensuring that it recognises the best training wherever it is found, regardless of the organisation, sector or funding. Certification against the Training Quality Standard for Employers is tough to achieve, so we can be confident in endorsing organisations with the best internal training functions. Consequently, the Standard is something which organisations can aspire to, and be proud of when they achieve it.

The Standard was developed with the intention of driving through a cultural change in the delivery of training and development to employers as independent customers, and so the assessment framework for employers has been adapted to look at an organisation’s internal training delivery and its ability to meet the needs of the wider business. The framework focuses on two linked delivery competencies:

Responding to the needs of other parts of the organisation as individual customers
This is covered in Part A of the Standard, assessing an organisation’s internal training provision for its responsiveness to individual customers within the organisation.
Developing and deploying products able to meet wider corporate objectives
This is covered in Part B of the Standard, assessing an organisation’s internal training function for its ability expertise and ability to deliver against, and meet, defined business needs based on the organisation’s wider corporate objectives.

As these two competencies are linked, Part A and B of the Training Quality Standard for Employers must be applied for simultaneously.

The Training Quality Standard for Employer's assessment framework creates a common language through which organisations can tell their stories of how they achieve against the tasks defined by the key concepts.

The framework isn't prescriptive; it defines what a training function should be doing rather than how, and asks organisations applying for assessment to tell their story from strategy, through approaches, to achievements.

The framework covers the following areas:

A.0 Plan
A.1 Fundamentals
A.2 Respond
A.3 Deliver
A.4 Relate
A.5 Perform
A.6 Improve
B.1 Understand
B.2 Deploy
B.3 Perform

The Process

The Training Quality Standard for Employers is a vehicle to assess and compare organisations delivering training and development solutions internally.

A robust assessment process has been created to sit alongside the framework which has been designed to achieve two main purposes:

To provide your organisation with a valuable experience
To provide a sound basis for decisions by a Certification Panel

The process is tough to ensure employers invest their trust in a certification.

The application you put together should describe, against the assessment framework how your organisation’s internal training function delivers to customers and develops its expertise.

The application process includes:

1. Registration

2. Application

3. Assessment

4. Verification

5. Customer Feedback

6. Panel Review

7. Feedback

Once your application is submitted, your Lead Assessor will work through your application, scoring it using the Standard's assessment methodology. The scoring mechanism is derived in part from the RADAR Scoring Matrix used in the EFQM Excellence Model copyright © 1999 - 2003 EFQM.

They and other Assessor/s will then visit you to verify the claims made in your applications, and refine the scores they have awarded. We will also need to talk to some of your customers and your corporate sponsor to make sure they would support a decision to certificate your organisation’s training function.

The outcomes of assessment, verification and customer feedback will then be passed to a Certification Panel to decide whether your organisation’s training function is fit to be recognised by the Training Quality Standard for Employers.

SERVICES

The Process