ITQ3, NVQ and other TLA's from the English education system

I am working on my ITQ3 at the moment. A somewhat thankless task, part of my "eating our dog food" philosophy. As a manager in the Education Sector I feel I should do regular consumer tests. I thought, rather optimistically as it turns out, that the ITQ might be fun.

ITQs are part of England's NVQ structure. National Vocational Qualifications, NVQs, are vocationally based qualifications originally designed to enable people who were working to have their knowledge and experience accredited and to provide them with a formal qualification equivalent to a conventional educational qualification.

NVQ's don't need to include any new skills, do not require you to follow a course or to gain any new knowledge, they can be purely an assessment of what you already know. This assessment involves the gathering of a portfolio of evidence to demonstrate that you meet all the requirements of the qualification.

This assessment route should make it less daunting for the student (or Learner as we are called in this world) although from my own point of view I would rather write an answer to a question or take an exam.

But there are no questions, there are only criteria, all of which have to be met. So here I sit trying to match my criteria.

The standards are the set by an SCC (Sector Skills Council). These are umbrella organisations representing the training needs of large and often disparate sectors. A list of the sector skills councils appear in my next blog along with an an attempt at describing the qualification system.

SCC for the IT industry is e-Skills and their NVQ standard for ITQ can be found at http://www.e-skills.com/nvq/1126 . (the page will force you register an email address and password to access this information)

I do wonder why I am doing this. I know I can do the stuff, or I wouldn't be able to compile my portfolio. My colleagues and management know I can do the stuff because they work with me and see me using it. So why bother? Well in the public sector 'a recognised IT qualification' often turns up in job specifications so having this will check a useful box.

The structure of the qualification is very rigid. If you do the Word Processing Module (by which they mean Microsoft Word - but this can't be acknowledged as any Word Processing software is supposedly acceptable). You must cover all the criteria so if you have never had to embed a spreadsheet in a word document (and why would you) you must contrive to do so in order to meet the criteria. If you can attach a printer or install a new driver it doesn't count if you are not following that particular module. Instead of looking at a broad range of skill they have created artificial modules based on Microsoft's division of the PC. The qualification is very obviously designed the suppliers of and educators in IT with little or no input from the business use end.

Still this blog has fulfilled one the criteria, contribution to a web site! Now I have to make three contributions web sites, so can I make two more entries or do they have to be different web sites. I'll have to email my assessor.

I'll just print the page, I know it's an IT user qualification but, the FE sector still likes to work from paper.