Heather Venis, AlphaPlus’ Senior Project Manager (Qualifications), gives practical guidance for awarding organisations looking to develop a qualification.
What’s in a qualification?
When embarking on a qualification project, one of the best questions to start with, is ‘what do you want to use it for?’. Sometimes it transpires that what is really wanted or needed is a training program, or a teaching curriculum, or lesson plans, and a qualification is not the best fit for the need. Or sometimes, the possession of a qualification may be the end goal, but there is journey in terms of standardising training, or ensuring industry standards are pitched right first, before starting a qualification development.
A qualification is important when you want to be able to set the standard at which you want employees/students to be able to perform. A qualification also provides an independent and objective benchmark for performance. It’s hardwired, as opposed to a training program that has flexibility in what and how things might be taught/trained. What’s included in the qualification standards needs to be right too, appropriately covering all the requirements you have and written in a way that is understandable.
Qualifications also include assessment, to check those employees/students can perform to the standard required across the chosen discipline/s. Whereas training or curriculum projects tend to be more about the process i.e. the learning, rather than the output. Training tends not to be about, or heavily focus on checking an individual’s performance level through assessment. It’s true some training can and does include assessment, but it does tend to be locally done, what’s tested and to what standard is often decided upon and carried out by the trainer, this can make it more open to their opinions and biases. Whereas a qualification, with pre-determined approaches and controls around assessment using clearly defined standards, provides a more reliable gauge about those employees/students’ knowledge, abilities and skills.
What do you want to assess?
A key thing about qualifications is reliability – it’s about conformity in what and how things are to be assessed, and ensuring that each time an assessment is carried out the results are dependable and valid. So the next question, after deciding a qualification is what is needed is, what is it you want to know about your employees’/students’ performance in that area? This is an important start point for qualification development, do you want to be sure about practical skills, competency, ability to understand or explain things, or may be its about operating at a safe level?
Setting some time aside to check and challenge the purpose/s, what will be important to assess and high level strategy for the development is recommended at the front end of a qualification project. This can help to avoid disappointment later down the line, where perhaps focus on particular skills, or testing at a higher level may be what’s needed, and it’s missing from the final draft qualification.
How best to assess skills, competency or knowledge and understanding also requires specialist advice. Working with those that have experience of designing and developing assessments that actually test what you want to test, in a way that is manageable and realistic will save time and effort when it comes to delivering assessments for your employees/students.
Having the right help on assessment design can also help when it comes to questions about whether you want to look in more detail at employee/student performance. Perhaps you might want to incentivise them to perform well, to separate out those who may have the capabilities to go onto make a real difference, or be promoted. In these circumstances a grading model to define merit or distinction candidates needs careful development. What those employees/students actually do in their assessment/s also needs to draw out their current and true levels of performance, to ensure a reliable assessment outcome.
Getting the balance right
A qualification should provide you with a valid and reliable way to understand the capacity of your employees/students. Assessment needs to draw out sufficient evidence of the skills or competency you are looking for too. To make this an efficient process and gain all the positives from going down a qualification route talk to us about the best choice for you. AlphaPlus has experience of creating qualifications in different countries that have different regulations and policy, across many industry sectors and amongst different client types from multinational businesses to governments and the military.
To find out more about how you can turn your learning programme into a qualification, or for more information about our expertise in qualifications, please contact Fraser Talbot at fraser.talbot@alphaplus.co.uk.
