Great feedback on Certificates of Competence

Last year Jayne was up to her eyeballs developing material for a new qualification scheme for the British pig industry, and now it's great to see the scheme rolling out and being so well received.

The aim was to 1) develop a skills and qualifications structure that is relevant to industry needs and accessible at all levels and flexible in structure, 2) to provide and promote an attractive environment for a progressive career in the pig industry and 3) to promote skills development as being central to business improvement.

Here's a short piece on it, which came through in this week's BPEX Weekly newsletter:

There are now 40 registered with Agskills covering the stage 1 basic stockmanship and stage 2 pig husbandry. There has been a 100% success rate in the assessments of employees at Skimble Crown, Ermine Farms, Richard Lister and JSR while those for other members are in the diary and are progressing well.

For members with no one registered yet, comments passed include:

"not as bad as I thought"

"the practical assessment was excellent, I really knew my stuff"

"the multi choice question was straight forward - I passed, oh that is brilliant, the first qualification I have ever got" (this guy was almost in tears)

The author of this snippet (I assume Gerry Brent of Agskills and PCS, tho I may be wrong) went on to say:

To give an idea of my satisfaction and enjoyment, I was assessing two very quiet guys who were very worried about the assessment but when we got going and during their assessments they showed their true capabilities and were bounding about because they readily knew all the answers. It was an absolute pleasure to report back to the members their success. Feedback from their managers has been one of praise for getting them to do the certificates of competence and showing that "they do know their stuff".

A pretty good start to the programme, and most satisfying to know that what we set out to achieve looks to be coming to fruition. Fingers crossed it does some good.