ACCA – Competency Framework

Pye Tait has been working with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants to develop a competency framework to present an holistic view of ACCA’s professional qualification, and present links to other aspects of being a professional accountant, including, for example, links to CPD and the CPD tool to self-assess and identify skills needs against a series of competencies.

It also includes links to ACCA’s careers website illustrating the linkages to different roles and pathways relative to different employers, and provides a means of taking the user from the competency framework to the ACCA examinations on a “by syllabus” basis, with the range of examination methods (e-assessment, paper-based or CBE).

BSE Research

Pye Tait will be contacting a selection of employers and trade associations in the UK’s building services engineering sector over the next few months in order to gather views on the training and skills requirements of the sector. The research will assist SummitSkills’ to enhance the performance of companies throughout its sector.

The first phase of this process is to carry out an “Occupational Functional Analysis” of the sector, reviewing whether the current structure of standards represent what BSE sector operatives are doing in their every day work, and identifying the competences they will require in the future.

This phase of the work is scheduled between October 2011 and the end of January 2012.

See the SummitSkills news item here.

Scottish Building Standards

Pye Tait Consulting is delighted to have won a competitive tender awarded by the Building Standards Division Directorate for the Built Environment within the Scottish Government to research and develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to support the building standards verification system.

The KPIs will contribute towards wider changes to the performance framework for building standards verification and will ensure that the activities of local authorities can be better compared to ensure consistency and quality in terms of outputs and overall service.

Review of OASIS

Following the recent success of our work to identify a set of key skills and develop a core job description for an Historic Environment Record Officer on behalf of English Heritage, Pye Tait is now conducting a review of the Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations System (OASIS).

In carrying out this fifth commission for English Heritage we will be preparing a forward strategy for OASIS which builds on the existing system and developing this to encompass the historic environment and the opportunities presented by a new IT platform. The work is being administered through the National Heritage Protection Commissions Programme.

Pye Tait Report on Competence in Construction

Pye Tait has recently completed extensive research evaluating the effectiveness of the various routes to competence available to site-based workers in construction (including supervisors and site managers).

The key research questions were whether current routes to competence – qualifications (both work-based and college-based), short courses, safety passports, competent person development, card schemes, as well as on-the-job mentoring and general experience – are adequate for the sector, and whether our understanding of what makes a construction worker “competent”, in the deepest health & safety sense, remains sufficiently robust for current-day needs.

Competence is evidenced directly by competence-based qualifications or indirectly by a plethora of card and passport schemes.

The research highlights other safety-critical industries that require ‘job competence’, enhanced health & safety awareness, and, critically, ‘human factors’. It concludes that the industry’s current understanding of “competence” may warrant extension to develop an ‘industry-specific’ definition and broadening to encompass both situational awareness and the sustaining of appropriate behaviours.

Our main report has now been published on HSE’s website and is available from the Published Reports section of our website.