4.A Assessing employers’ satisfaction

Company survey

Introduction

Employers are often willing and able to help with keeping the gap between education and work as close as possible. To do this, it has to be perfectly clear for them what the goal is, what is required of them and how much time it takes. A frequent company survey is an easy way of maintaining your relationship with businesses in a constructive way, since:

• It supports your dialogue with employers regarding craftsmanship and its development.
• It helps employers to articulate their requirements, whilst you test the job profiles, their variety and evolution so as to keep them up to date.
• It enables employers to give their objectified feedback and for you to assess your iVET trainees’ and graduates’ performance against the standard set by the Occupational Profile - and to compare it with the performance and competence of experienced workers.
• It enables employers to express their opinions and for you to identify points of improvement for the VET curriculum.
• It helps you to support employers through a more development-oriented personnel policy
• It will also ensure employer engagement and their willingness to participate in a dialogue with iVET providers.

Employers often find it hard to respond to open questions. They find it easier (and more productive) if they have something concrete to which they can respond. The job profiles proved to be an excellent basis to establish the companies’ satisfaction.

Which companies and business representatives to involve?

It is wise to involve sector representatives with the job profiles to use for this survey but for the actual survey it is essential to involve only the companies themselves. These companies must be representative for the sector and the jobs concerned. This means there has to be some variation in character, scale and region of the participants. The variation in scale might be threatened by another condition to be met: the companies also need to be in a position to provide insightful judgement on the issues at stake. This requires a certain amount of experience with employees and graduates/trainees in these jobs, leading to companies that will be a bit bigger and more active than average.

An alternative can be to involve and engage specialised employment agencies. Equally, a Human Resources officer can be helpful during initial stage to check the relevance of the job profiles.

It is important to make sure that the actual assessments are carried out by those in positions of operational management (of the employees in the jobs concerned). These managers have to be both responsible for and experienced in performance appraisals. They must know the people well.

Company assessments

The task and ability profiles composed can be easily converted to forms for checking the profiles themselves as well as assessing the employees’ performances, both in terms of tasks to perform as well as abilities to possess. The next examples are taken from the evaluation of kitchen staff training in England and Greece. They distinguish tasks and skills. Compe-tence-oriented professional profiles usually do not make such a distinction. In that case, you have only one assessment and can focus on the ability assessment as an example for a competence-assessment (with an additional questionnaire).

Task assessment

The table below present the average performance of an experienced employee and of a fresh graduate on the different task to perform within the restaurant sector.

Tasks are defined as a usually assigned piece of work to be done and accomplish the intended result within a certain time.  

 ⬛ indicate that this is a task the Porter, Cook or Head Chef make.

The grey columns show the tasks to perform as defined in the Occupational Profiles. Companies add or remove tasks to their adjust them to their own situation.This image shows the first three task fields of the three kitchen jobs concerned.

In the yellow columns, companies can indicate how their experienced employees are doing on average in terms of "good result within time?"

In the blue colsyumns, the companies can indicate how their trainees or fresh graduates are doing. The scale in this example is limited to three options:

- = under expected level, ✔ = at the expected level (default), + = above expected level

Ability assessment

The assessment of knowledge, skills and competences has a similar setup. The next example of such a form shows a small part of the ability profiles in the same three kitchen jobs: 

Ability are synonym with capacity or capability. The physical or mental power or skill needed to do something.

In the grey columns companies can correct the levels required in their own situation.

In the yellow and blue columns they can adjust the default for scoring respectively experienced workers and trainees/fresh graduates.

The levels required are defined like this

A. Basic: Works under supervision, assisting others, mostly simple/frequent/low risk work

B. Advanced: Self-reliant, can deal with most issues and solve most problems

C. Expert: Is specialist in this field, can help, lead, guide and teach others

The assessment scale again is limited to 3 levels and the default is set to “OK” to make it easy to score for the employers

- = under expected level, ✔ = at the expected level (default), + = above expected level

Examples of company assessments available

For inspiration take a look at “4.B.1. Kitchen staff company assessment”

For inspiration take a look at “4.B.2. Electricians company assessment”

For inspiration take a look at “4.B.3. Banking staff company assessment”

Additional questionnaire

The assessment needs a proper introduction and will not be complete without some information about the context as well as some additional, relevant information. The next examples - based on a survey among Swedish electricians - give you an idea of the items and content of the questionnaire to accompany the assessment forms. They can be used as a checklist for an interviewer, or added to the assessment forms in a survey on-line or in print. 

Examples of company questionnaires available

Please advise the file “4.B.4. Kitchen staff company questionnaire”

Please advise the file “4.B.5. Electricians company questionnaire”

Taking into account the diversity of stakeholders, it is often difficult to get a common picture of both the current practice and the future developments. The good practice example below from the Italian National Report on the Financial and Banking sector outlines an interesting picture of the VET dynamics in the short run.

The VET dynamics presented below create a solid basis for reviewing current educational provision and show where to focus both in relation to job profiles, abilities and tasks.