What is Quality and What Does it Look Like in Training?
Have you ever wondered how you can scale your business, delegate without all the work coming back to you, ensure you are prepared when employees leave, or reduce redundancy while increasing consistency?
You’re in luck because quality standards lay out a roadmap you can follow to build an organizational foundation that supports quality, consistency, and continuous improvement—and, as a benefit, results in scalability, preparing for employee succession, and ensuring you have the structure to delegate with confidence.
But wait, my organization is unique. General standards won’t be designed for the way we do things!
Most standards are designed to be universal, meaning they can be applied to any organization—regardless of size, industry, sector, and region. They describe the areas where organizations should focus, make decisions, and document processes to drive behaviors, attitudes, and activities that lead to consistently and repeatably delivering products and services that meet customer needs and expectations. ISO 9000: Quality management systems—fundamentals and vocabulary defines seven quality management principles that act as a foundation for building and maintaining quality in any organization. These are the areas where you should focus if you want to consistently meet customer needs and exceed their expectations with high-quality services and goods.
- Customer Focus
- Leadership
- Engagement of People
- Process Approach
- Improvement
- Evidence-Based Decision Making
- Relationship Management
I can see how these principles help organizations develop quality operations, but how can I apply them to consistently provide excellent training experiences for my learners?
Based on more than 50 years of research and experience, the ANSI/IACET 1-2018 Standard for Continuing Education and Training (CE/T Standard) layers elements of training excellence on top of the general foundations of organizational quality. The result is a flexible standard that defines the areas where you need documented policies and procedures, but not the specifics of how you conduct your business in those areas. Here’s how IACET’s CE/T Standard approaches each of the foundational principles of quality:
Customer Focus
In learning and development, you often need to please multiple audiences at the same time. While your learners are your primary customer, if you provide job-related training, you also have to meet the performance expectations of their supervisors and organizations. IACET’s CE/T Standard drives a customer focus from multiple angles.
- Support: including communications, environment, technology, and expectations
- Research: ensuring courses address a real need faced by the learners
- Outcomes-focus: providing learners with the skills they need to perform on the job
Leadership
Leaders determine organizational priorities and, ultimately, what work gets done. Developing quality systems and then working within those systems requires time and resources that aren’t available without the engagement and support of senior leaders. IACET’s CE/T Standard addresses these needs by requiring organizations to include training and development in their planning, ensure ongoing resourcing, and appropriate staff to deliver their training programs with a consistent level of quality.
Engagement of People
Your products and services are a direct reflection of your people. Everyone, from your IT staff to administrative staff to instructors, influence how customers experience your training. The Standard requires you to determine what roles are involved in your training lifecycle and what qualifications are required in each role. You also need to maintain policies that define how each role engages with your learners—how they communicate, engage with, and follow up with your customers.
Process Approach
Predictable, documented processes are the foundation of consistency and allow you to scale, delegate, and prepare new employees efficiently. Many applicants find that, through the exercise of developing and reviewing their processes, they identify redundancy and gaps and find new ways to increase efficiency. At its core, the CE/T Standard is about processes. IACET does not accredit your courses or programs; we accredit your organization based on your policies, processes, and evidence that you are following them.
Improvement
The world is constantly changing. The methods that resulted in quality a year ago may be outdated now. To continue to provide high-quality products and services, you need to regularly review the way you work to determine if it’s still effective, efficient, and right for your organization. Our CE/T Standard drives continuous improvement of your organization, policies and processes, and training by requiring you to implement regular review cycles in a way that works for your organization. To meet the Standard, you will need to review your policies, and processes, the effectiveness of your training program, and the currency and applicability of your training.
Evidence-Based Decision Making
Every day, you make thousands of decisions about your training organization. Which courses should we offer? Which courses should we remove from the catalog? Which instructors should we hire? How many students can participate in the class while still allowing for engagement? What courses need to be revised? Quality training organizations make these decisions in a consistent way that minimizes unforeseen consequences. They can do that because they rely on data to minimize risk and maximize the opportunity for improvement. In the CE/T Standard, IACET requires you to determine and document how your organization will collect data about student needs, learning success, and classroom experience to drive your training decisions.
Relationship Management
Training organizations don’t exist in a vacuum. They rely on external people and organizations. We already looked at the role of customer satisfaction, but what about the other critical relationships? What about the HR department that helps you hire the right people? The IT department that supports your LMS and virtual teaching platforms? The other departments that loan you subject matter experts and review technical content? To ensure you continue to have the support you need to maintain training excellence, you need to make sure your policies and processes address their needs and that their experiences working with you are good. During the process of documenting and implementing your procedures, you need to involve external stakeholders. If you don’t include them in documenting the work they partner on, your likelihood of success and their willingness to support you decrease.
If you want to know more about how to incorporate the elements of quality systems in your training organization and achieve accreditation, check out our complimentary Guide to IACET Accreditation or attend a complimentary Introduction to IACET Accreditation Webinar.
About the Author
Obsessed with integrating quality throughout the training ecosystem, Kelly has dedicated her career to ensuring learners have access to training that helps them succeed in their careers, and organizations have the right people with the right skills in the right roles to accomplish their strategic goals.
Kelly is an experienced talent development leader with more than 20 years of training and development experience in the military, federal government, corporate, and higher education sectors. As IACET’s Vice President of Accreditation, she leverages her diverse background to help you find the right path to achieve your accreditation and quality goals, regardless of sector.
Before joining the IACET team, Kelly supported IACET’s vision of a world that learns better by participating on and chairing the Open Digital Credential taskforce, participating on the Competency Based Training taskforce, and serving on IACET’s Board of Directors.