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How to use National Occupational Standards

How can I use National Occupational Standards?

National Occupational Standards set out the skills, knowledge and understanding that employers and practitioners agree someone needs in order to be able to do a particular job well. They set the nationally agreed standards of good practice for that role.

They are a useful tool for making sure the job descriptions, roles and responsibilities and appraisals relate to those nationally agreed standards. They are also useful for identifying in which areas someone needs to develop their skills and knowledge so they can do their job well. While training providers and people offering informal skills and knowledge development can use them to plan their training and learning so that it is relevant to the nationally agreed standard.

Who can use National Occupational Standards?

Staff and volunteers can use National Occupational Standards to:

• Measure their performance, knowledge and understanding against a nationally agreed checklist
• Identify where they need to develop their skills, knowledge and understanding
• Help them decide what skills, knowledge and understanding they will need to progress their career

HR staff and line managers can use National Occupational Standards to:

• Design fair and transparent recruitment and selection procedures
• Design job descriptions, advertisements and interview questions
• Design induction programmes and information packs
• Carry out appraisals
• Identify individual or team learning needs

Training providers can use National Occupational Standards to:

• Make training programmes more relevant to people’s needs
• Provide clear goals for structured learning
• Design tailored training packages and assess relevance and effectiveness courses
• Define the learning outcomes

Other people within a third sector organisation can use National Occupational Standards to:

• Help with strategic planning
• Develop resources that are benchmarked to nationally recognised best practice
• Contribute evidence to the organisation’s quality systems

Where do I start?

To get started, you need to identify which National Occupational Standards are relevant to your organisation and the people in your organisation.

Skills – Third Sector publishes the National Occupation Standards for fundraising, campaigning, managing volunteers, development workers and trustees and informal standards for monitoring and evaluation. Other skills bodies hold National Occupational Standards for other roles found in some charities such as counselling, guidance and advocacy, childcare, administration and IT. Copies of all standards are available from this website and from http://www.ukstandards.org.uk/.

Once you have copies of the relevant National Occupational Standards, you need to work with staff and volunteers within your organisation to identify which Standards contain units that are relevant to their job roles.

You may need to look in different standards to cover all aspects of a role: for example, someone responsible for managing a team of volunteers will find much of what they do in the National Occupational Standards for Management of Volunteers, but may also use some of the standards within the National Occupational Standards for Mental Health and Counselling.

Once you have identified the relevant standards from the National Occupational Standards you can use those to carry out the HR tasks listed above.

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