Occupational standards useful

There are a number of things that occupational standards can be applied to.

 

Technical Officer at the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Council, Alicia Sealy, told those gathered at the Open Forum on ‘The Role of the TVET Council in the Competency-Based Education and Training System’ in the Barbados Employers’ Confederation (BEC) Conference Room recently that these uses include curriculum development, defining training programmes and drafting job descriptions, among other things.

 

“Occupational standards have a number of uses. You can use it to develop curriculum and this is a new area that the TVET Council is venturing into. We are developing curriculum from the occupational standards. You can also use them to define training programmes and you can also use them to structure work-based learning. So at the end of when supervisors, for example, conduct their performance reviews for their workers, they would be able to tell that there are gaps in the knowledge that the employers might have. So they are able to use the occupational standards and pluck some of the units which would be geared towards the training needs of the candidates at that point in time and deliver the training to their employees. We can also use the occupational standards to develop job descriptions.”

 

She said that when it comes to assessing worker performance, for example, this can start by first determining what a candidate needs to know and then they can move towards finding out how much he or she has learnt.

 

“After we have decided what a candidate needs to know and what a candidate needs to be able to do, we were able to determine that by using the occupational standards, we now need to find out what the candidate has learnt and what the candidate is able to do. How we do that is by conducting assessments.”

 

In addition, at TVET, it is not about having a candidate pass or fail outright, but rather determining if he or she is competent or not yet competent in a given area, said Sealy.

 

“In traditional training, we talk about pass and fail, but in TVET, we talk about competent and not yet competent – (what) a person can do or they can’t do as yet. In this model, you would see that we have eight activities there… First, we have to plan. We have to plan with the candidates and the assessor to determine when the assessment is going to take place, where it is going to take place, the time and the venue and the activity that we would be looking or observing you with when they come to assess you.”