For experienced construction professionals OSAT, On Site Assessment and Training, has been the preferred NVQ delivery route. However, in practice, candidates report that the Training part of the OSAT process is often lacking or inadequate!
Putting the ‘T’ back into the OSAT pot!
Dear NVQ candidate,
The statement I have received many times is, “I could answer the question if I could understand what the the question was getting at. I could then relate the question to my work experience”.
This lack of training has become more of a problem in recent years because of the huge shift towards answering knowledge questionaires or candidate statements rather than providing site documentation as evidence. Consequently this has created difficulties for many construction professionals because these questionnaires have been written in the language of the National Occupational Standards (NOS) rather than the language used onsite.
I’ve been assessing NVQs since 2007 and in that time I’ve worked on the qualifications of over 500 management candidates, the majority of which were not from an academic background, which is representive of the industry. Despite this, candidates are being asked to complete an academic exercise to gain a professional qualification.
A common solution to this problem has been down to the hard working NVQ assessor assisting the candidate as much as he or she has been able. It is the assessor’s role and responsibility to give the guidance and support necessary to enable the candidate to provide the necessary evidence to meet the required NOS standards. In practice assessors must achieve this by often repeating the same guidance many times to many of their candidates. However, candidate progress can be very slow and many candidates have just given up because the amount of time an assessor can give to each candidate is limited!
To help resolve this problem for candidates and assessors, we at RivaSure have specifically created a series of Audio Podcasts based on the NVQ learning aims and standards for the NVQ management units. Each individual audio podcast enables a candidate to give an informed written response to each of the standards that requires a written response. This enables each candidate to more easily complete their candidate statements or knowledge questionnaires.
The typical standards that require a written response usually commence with the words; Describe, Explain and How. Each of our Audio Podcasts unpacks the standard statement and gives insight and guidance so that all candidates are then able to locate themselves and their working history specifically to what is being requested. We do not give specific answers but the guidance given is designed to trigger a correct candidate response adequate to the level of qualification required.
This low-cost system of candidate NVQ guidance/mentoring course is being offered to all candidates as part of our NVQ delivery service or as a simply stand-alone and on-demand series. You can either purchase each unit individually or as a bundle of 20 Units.
The only prerequisite to purchasing each course is that you complete the starter/induction unit first. This is an excellent induction starter unit because it gives a good framework to understand the ‘What’ and ‘How’ of writing up your NVQ statements. Our Starter / Induction unit also includes summaries for the other 19 units and some FREE samples for non-registered users.
Our Additional Online Guidance Series has proven to be a boost to candidates to more effectively fast-track them through the qualification. Each course matches a unit in the Edexcel NVQ Level 6 Diploma curriculum in Construction Management and are intended for guidance only.(The complete series and more, is included free-of-charge to all our NVQ Level 6 Registered candidates)Series Summary