Green Deal

The forthcoming Green Deal will require many new and enhanced skills of the UK workforce. Pye Tait has been assessing the scale of the potential Green Deal workforce, the skills they currently have, the skills they require (both now and in the future), and the potential for this requirement to be met by current training provision. Commissioned by a partnership of Sector Skills Councils, our research will underpin a new Green Deal Competence Framework, using funding from the UK Commission’s Employer Investment Fund (EIF).

Over the last few years, Pye Tait has built up considerable knowledge and expertise over several commissioned studies researching renewable technologies and low carbon needs at regional, national and UK levels.

Supporting Awarding Organisations

Pye Tait has been working with a number of Awarding Organisations to review and develop portfolios of training qualifications. We are consulting with technical experts, employers, professional bodies and trade associations to review and refine the content, size and structure of existing provision; develop new units to align with the latest NOS; and compile new multi-choice question and answer knowledge banks.

Construction Industry Expertise

Pye Tait has accrued extensive experience and knowledge of the construction industry and the building services sector through many varied research and development projects. These have included:

• Skills surveys (on a regional, national and UK-wide level)
• Training provision analysis (national and UK-wide)
• Qualifications and National Occupational Standards (NOS) review and development

Pye Tait has established relationships with many industry stakeholders and we have surveyed businesses of all sizes offering both construction and professional services. Our clients have included the industry’s related Sector Skills Councils, the Health and Safety Executive, English Heritage and Historic Scotland, professional bodies, industry training bodies, trade associations and Awarding Bodies.

We design and tailor our research approaches to meet and, very often, exceed client requirements. Many of our research projects call on multi-modal methodologies to provide our clients with quantifiable and in-depth information that will be replicable, robust and most of all, extremely useful to the client and its intended audiences. Visit the reports and downloads area to view a selection of published reports.

Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF)

Brought into existence in 2008, the QCF (replacing the previous National Qualifications Framework – which is set to close at the end of 2010) is a new unit-based framework for creating and accrediting qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It does this by awarding credit for units (small steps of learning) and enables learners to gain qualifications at their own pace along flexible routes.

Pye Tait Consulting has accumulated a great deal of experience and expertise relating to the QCF. Our researchers are well versed in the requirements for QCF unit-writing and developing Rules of Combination for qualifications. Our staff attended QCF unit-writing workshops ran by QCDA and have provided services to a number of organisations of unit conversion/QCF development projects for a range of different sectors.

This in-depth experience has been used to good effect when carrying out a recent evaluation of one of the key strands of QCF reform with SSCs/ Awarding Organisations, providers and employers on behalf of the Skills Funding Agency. The wider aspects of this work required in-depth, face-to-face interviews to examine actual implementation of the QCF in terms of flexibility and fit for purpose assessment of the new QCF qualifications.

Psychometrics

We use a range of psychometric assessment tools, from motivational and personality questionnaires and ability tests, to more specialist tools that can identify likely behaviour of individuals during stressful situations, and ways of addressing this. 

We use two main types of psychometric assessments:

• Ability testing
• Personality testing

The personality tools we use include:

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• 16PF (16 personality factor questionnaire)
• OPQ32 (occupational personality questionnaire)
• Hogan Development Survey (designed to identify how individuals behave when under stress)
• Belbin Team Types (identifies the likely role(s) an individual will take on within a team)

For more information on our range of assessment and development services, please visit the business services pages of our website.