Business review - Key customers
From the police force to McDonalds, and from the Royal Navy to Bedford College, we’ve helped our key customers reach their training goals this year.
Our new Strategic Plan has a strong focus on employers – and this year we have worked hand-in-hand with a range of employers to help them get what they want from skills, whether that’s an efficient workforce, compliance with the law, or increased effectiveness in their local communities. We have also provided resources to key customers, such as colleges, to help them deliver our qualifications effectively and engagingly to their own customers – learners.
Tailored solutions
A new electrical safety inspection service has been developed alongside AXA and the National Electrical Certification & Training Alliance.
Taking the lead
City & Guilds have taken further steps to professionalise sectors, now NCP are making sure all their parking attendants get their City & Guilds.
Strength in depth
From the NHS to the Royal Navy, City & Guilds is helping shape the skills sector, read more about our activities.
Skills in force
City & Guilds have successfully won the NVQ Policing contracts with the London Metropolitan Police and clinched an innovative pilot scheme with West Midlands Police in 2007.
At the sharp end
52,000 employers have signed up for Train to Gain, read about the City & Guilds contribution.
Eliminating barriers
Reacting to shifting work patterns in a global economy is not just about improved vocational training but also changing employer behaviour.
Flexible support
New technology brings flexibility to what City & Guilds can offer its clients.
Tailored solutions
In business, one size rarely fits all – and in 2006-2007, our Business Unit tailored learning solutions to the customer rather than take a standardised approach out into the market. In October 2006, we joined forces with AXA and the National Electrical Certification & Training Alliance (NECTA) to introduce an innovative and bespoke electrical inspections service for small to medium sized businesses in the UK.
The new Electrical Safety Inspection Service is carried out under strict quality controls by City & Guilds’ qualified inspectors and adheres to AXA’s transparent pricing policy. NECTA has even slashed the waiting time for businesses – from three months to 10 days. This means homeowners’ minds can be at ease. On top of the inspection, businesses get an easy-to-understand report which outlines the exact condition of the electrical systems in non-technical terms.
Another Business Unit success story in 2006-2007 was when McDonalds launched a pilot to deliver Hospitality and Catering Multiskilling NVQs in both its company and franchise restaurants. With the support of the Business Unit, McDonalds piloted a new type of assessment strategy that allows it to integrate the NVQ into business as usual. McDonalds has a desire to offer appropriate NVQs company-wide to all staff, and it wants to fill the gap that exists between external perceptions and the internal reality of working for McDonalds. The Business Unit is helping them achieve this goal.
Taking the lead
While City & Guilds reacted to customer needs in 2006-2007, it also took the lead in the professionalisation of certain sectors. The introduction of the City & Guilds Level 2 Certificate for Parking Attendants has greatly contributed to the transformation of the parking sector. Training is now standardised and nationally accredited. With the backing of the British Parking Association, large employers including NCP and Vinci Parking have taken up the qualification with great success. Local authorities are beginning to incorporate into their contracts the requirement that parking attendants have a nationally accredited qualification at level 2.
The continued success of the parking attendants’ qualification is not only leading to self regulation, but increasing the awareness of nationally accredited qualifications and professionalising the industry. City & Guilds NPTC is on a similar journey with the National Register of Sprayer Operators (NRoSO) which focuses on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) as a means of ongoing training. In April 2007, City & Guilds NPTC announced a fundamental review of the scheme which has been running for four years to make it more user-friendly, relevant, and better value for sprayer operators.
One major change to the scheme will be the introduction of a new database and web access as part of the skillscard project, which will dramatically cut paperwork and bureaucracy. The 23,000 NRoSO members can look forward to a new and exciting system that will make their lives far simpler.
Strength in depth
The range of City & Guilds’ customers in 2006-2007 highlights the strength and depth of our qualifications and services. In health, we are now working with the Terence Higgins Trust to obtain sponsorship for the development of learning materials for HIV and AIDS. We also helped contribute to the NHS Strategy review. Meanwhile, the UK branch of Getinge, a Swedish Medical company, signed up with City & Guilds for accreditation, which could lead to work across their international branches. Another accreditation client, Siemens, began discussions with us about how to deliver our NVQs.
The Royal Navy joined ILM as a corporate member in 2007, so that now hundreds of Royal Navy managers are taking advantage of enhanced career support and development. The Second Sea Lord, Vice Admiral Adrian J Johns CBE ADC, was responsible for the decision. ‘The Royal Navy has always laid great store in the quality of its leadership and management at all levels. I am very proud that ILM has recognised the value of the training and experience our people gain throughout their naval careers by giving us accreditation. We have to recognise that our people may well leave at some point to begin a career in civilian industry, so it is important that the skills acquired in the Royal Navy are recognised in the business world.’
The publishing of the Leitch Review saw saw dramatic changes in the direction of the higher level skills agenda. The Review highlighted the pivotal role that needs to be played by employers and higher education in adult skills development. Our Higher Level Qualifications and Senior Awards teams have been actively involved in these changes; working directly with employers to recognise skills, career courses and CPD and by providing universities with flexible ways of accrediting skills-based programmes.
For example we are working with Leeds University, accrediting programmes delivered to Yorkshire Water, First Direct and the Emergency Planning College. We are also working directly with employers such as Waitrose to add value to in house programmes and to provide a benchmark for higher level skills.
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Skills in force
After a long campaign involving much effort and dedication from members of the Justice and Security team, the Business Unit and the Quality team, City & Guilds successfully won the NVQ Policing contracts with the London Metropolitan Police and clinched an innovative pilot scheme with West Midlands Police in 2007. This was a major achievement that built upon City & Guilds’ commitment to vocational qualifications within the justice sector, and is a benchmark partnership between an awarding body and the police.
The City & Guilds Policing NVQs are designed to prove that probationary police officers are assessed against a nationally recognised set of standards, ensuring that wherever they are working in the UK they demonstrate the same level of skill and expertise. With the London Metropolitan Police, the NVQ covers its Initial Police Learning and Development Programme, involving around 31,000 officers across 32 boroughs.
With the West Midlands Police, the agreement covered a pilot scheme for its Student Officer Training Programme at level 4. West Midlands needed 15 full-time assessors and verifiers to deliver the NVQ Level 4 in Policing but did not want to hire this number of administrative staff. City & Guilds provided an alternative assessment strategy, mapping the role of assessor to sergeant and training liaison officer to internal verifier. While still in pilot phase with a full evaluation to be completed in 2008, this was a cutting edge initiative.
Winning these contracts is a clear indication that City & Guilds is serious when it comes to policing, justice and the broader communities concerned. By the end of September 2007, City & Guilds had on board 11 other police forces that are delivering the NVQ, meaning that we now qualify 38% of all probationary officers in the UK.
At the sharp end
With today’s employers demanding a more highly-skilled workforce as the UK faces increasing competition in a global economy, City & Guilds took up the challenge of Train to Gain in 2007. As the initiative marked its first anniversary, more than 52,000 employers had signed up, exceeding the targets set by government.
Myra Wall from City & Guilds’ regional office in the West Midlands has been progressing Train to Gain for 12 months, working with around 50 skills brokers so that they can be more effective in convincing local businesses to get funded level 2 training for their staff to learn business improvement techniques (BIT) and IT qualifications (ITQ). She says: ‘Train to Gain has targeted a new audience in small to medium enterprises (SMEs) who can be hard to reach. For example, if three people in a 10-person company need to go away on a course, that’s a huge disruption, so our colleges and centres have traditionally found it difficult to convince SMEs to go down the training route.’
To help skills brokers reach out to SMEs, Wall and her colleagues have been running workshops to help skills brokers understand the benefits of BIT and ITQ. ‘Employers need to understand the impact on their bottom line, so we’re giving the brokers better information. It’s working very well and there are a lot of success stories.’
Eliminating barriers
Reacting to shifting work patterns in a global economy is not just about improved vocational training but also changing employer behaviour. Research commissioned by ILM and published in July 2007 revealed that poor management is blocking the UK’s path to productivity. The Tomorrow’s Leaders study, undertaken by Henley Management College, showed that managers are struggling to reinvent their working patterns to get the best from a growing army of remote workers, with visibility still used to judge performance.
According to the findings, remote working is on the rise. Three quarters (73%) of managers say flexible working is common in their organisation, and, more strikingly, 37% of all managers now look after teams who are either entirely or predominantly based away from the office. However, although the majority of managers are working with teams that include remote workers, nearly half (44%) of respondents say managers are unprepared for the supervision of remote teams, and only 25% had received any training on how to manage such a team – something ILM aims to address.
Flexible support
New technology brings flexibility to what City & Guilds can offer its clients. In January Secretary of State Des Browne announced that the two packages of the major MoD Training Bid had been won by Metrix Consortium, of which City & Guilds is a member.
Five years ago, we broke new ground with the introduction of Global Online Assessment (GOLA) and in 2006-2007 we celebrated our two millionth candidate to be assessed online. All parts of the business have embraced GOLA, including City & Guilds HAB, which has earned £78,000 from this source alone.
We also began working with the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) to convert its objectively tested paper-based exams to a computer-based testing using the GOLA system adapted to CII’s business processes. The result in 2007 was over 20,000 CII online tests completed since launch. Employer customers are installing exam centres within their premises and running sessions themselves or candidates are visiting one of a bespoke network of City & Guilds GOLA-enabled centres across the UK to take their exam. These 64 centres in 36 locations include colleges, training providers and other businesses – all key partners in the venture’s success.
Online testing is transforming the learning and testing experience with the flexibility of on-demand exams and a reduced administrative burden for tutors. Employers can receive rapid confirmation of a candidate’s abilities at times of skill shortages, and elimination of the previous four-to-six month delay makes a huge difference to the workforce.
Melissa Peacock, Advanced Practitioner at Bedford College, first started using City & Guilds support materials to aid delivery of lessons just over a year ago. Since then, the online support portal SmartScreen, coupled with Learnxtra, has complemented Melissa’s pool of teaching resources with effective, time-saving teaching materials. ‘The tutors love the fact that students can have fun while learning and that the lesson plans are flexible, meaning they can be amended if necessary to fit into how we deliver lessons at the centre,’ she says.
Bedford College soon added the Essential Knowledge and Understanding (EKU) tests to their support resources, which are delivered on City & Guilds’ GOLA system. With a cohort of beauty therapy students taking paper-based EKU tests, marking was always a challenge for the department’s tutors. However, thanks to moving to online EKU tests, tutors no longer have several hundreds of papers to mark across the cohort just for one attempt. Throughout the months of April, May and June 2007, tutors were able to mark at home in their own time, providing increased flexibility.
Bedford College chose City & Guilds because of its high standards as well as rigorous and supportive external verifiers. ‘The quality is reflected in the success of our learners. Last year, 100% of our level 3 beauty learners got jobs in the industry, the majority with premier employers,’ says Melissa. ‘The main bulk of learners had jobs arranged even before they completed their qualification. The industry clearly recognises and respects City & Guilds’ high standard when it comes to vocational learning and support.’