The Framework - Training Excellence

What is Training Excellence?
The 5 Principles
The Improvement Framework
The IDEAL Framework
Downloadable Guide

What is Training Excellence?

Training Excellence is an improvement platform for training organisations. It helps them to understand their ability to respond to, and impact on, customers’ business needs. Training Excellence helps organisations identify their strengths and highlights the critical issues they will need to tackle to be better, and become a high innovation, high impact provider: an Excellent Training Organisation. Training Excellence helps training organisations to be better at what they do: clearer strategy, innovative delivery, stronger relationships.

Training Excellence gives us the framework and the tools to understand and assess training organisations and help them by designing and deploying solutions which can drive improvement. Ready for any type of training organisations - large or small, public or private - Training Excellence homes in on critical improvement issues and creates the space to solve them. At the heart of Training Excellence is a robust, empirical evidence base on customer need and excellent practice, set out in the five Principles of Training Excellence. Alongside the Principles are three Business Perspectives on the way training organisations operate; and then four IDEAL Maturity Concepts, which we use for robust, rigorous assessment. Together, these Principles, Perspectives and Concepts form the basis of the Training Excellence Improvement Framework:

Training Excellence is a perfectionist framework. For us, all training organisations, regardless of their track record or their status, have room to do better in their work and in their achievement for customers. Now more than ever in a tough and challenging market, the need to work harder to understand and respond to customer needs with ever fresher, more exacting content has never been greater.

But Training Excellence isn’t about self-appointed experts telling training organisations how to run their business. Every organisation has its own priorities and its own journey towards Training Excellence. Instead, we bring the expertise and the tools to help you to drill down into your operations - to understand and learn from them, to think differently, to collaborate with fresh input, and above all, to help you become better at what you do.

The 5 Principles

The 5 Principles of Training Excellence bring together the evidence we’ve accumulated over many years of research and development of what Excellent Training Organisations do - how they achieve what customers want and need, and how they operate in a way which ensure sustained success. Together, the 5 Principles offer a vision of high innovation, high impact operation to which all training organisations should aspire.

Each of the 5 Principles offers not only the prospect of success, but also a sense of the details necessary to avoid leaving success to chance. Excellent Training Organisations, after all, are those with structures fit to deliver their mission, and with the right capabilities in place to deliver and sustain high performance. More to the point, Excellent Training Organisations show the same coherence across their work, delivering responsively but decisively, and creating content fresh and relevant to their customers’ needs.

The 5 Principles reflect many years’ research, development and design for CFE, both into customers’ experiences and training organisations’ lessons learned. Our evidence base includes testimonies from hundreds of employers with experience of accessing, buying and taking delivery of training solutions, along with the experiences of hundreds of training organisations’ own operating models - some effective, some ineffective, but each with its own lessons.

Each Principle defines a function which a training organisation must be able to perform, and perform well, if it wants to aspire to excellence. No training organisation is likely to achieve completely and sustainably against all five of Training Excellence’s Principles; but to be deemed ‘excellent’, they must be able to demonstrate a solid account against each one.

The 5 Principles of Training Excellence

	Ready Communications Excellent Training Organisations communicate readily, clearly and frequently with all stakeholders about what the organisation is doing to satisfy their needs.
	Rigorous Analysis Excellent Training Organisations rely on facts and rigorous analysis to make decisions on strategy and service delivery, securing impact for customers’ businesses.
	Responsive Service Excellent Training Organisations respond to customers’ needs and expectations with high and responsive standards of service, driving customer satisfaction.
	Robust Deployment Excellent Training Organisations are robust in deploying their internal plans and their proposals to customers, achieving sustained business results.
	Rich Content Excellent Training Organisations draw on innovation and best practice to create and deliver rich content which secures impact for customers’ businesses.

The Improvement Framework

The 5 Principles of Training Excellence should run throughout the work a training organisation does - but they’re not a business model, and certainly not a checklist. To make Training Excellence the powerful tool it is, we therefore need to translate the meaning embodied in the Principles into a structure we can use to directly compare them with real organisations’ operations.

That’s where the Training Excellence Improvement Framework comes in. The Improvement Framework interprets the Principles in terms of three Business Perspectives which together allow for a comprehensive view on a training organisation’s operations. Those three Perspectives are Organisation - which is about who you are, why you do your work, as well as who is involved, inside and outside the organisation’s boundaries; Capability, which is about what you do and how you do it, and how you make sure it’s successful; and Performance, which is about what you achieve and how you measure it, and what use you make of the information.

Organisation is the context in which operations take place, but Capability and Performance are where we see them. For that reason, we further break down both Capability and Performance into the three Dimensions - Strategy, Relationships and Delivery. These three Dimensions each represent a distinct business process and also map to three performance areas - Results, Satisfaction and Impact.

Together, these three Business Perspectives and three Dimensions define seven distinct Criteria by which we can understand and assess training organisations’ operations. Those Criteria are made up of Indicators, each of which describes a functional requirement which must be fulfilled to operate successfully. Together, these twenty Indicators form the Improvement Framework, a comprehensive description of Training Excellence.

Organisation

O.1 What customers the organisation offers its services to, and what benefits those services offer.
O.2 What aims the organisation serves, what activities it delivers, and how this links to wider goals.
O.3 How the organisation is managed, how it communicates internally, and its operating model.
O.4 Who the organisation works with, including employers and their employees, suppliers and partners.

Strategy gets Results

CS.1 Objectives for all aspects of performance are defined and communicated to appropriate stakeholders.
CS.2 Market and customers’ needs and expectations are investigated and analysed.
CS.3 Products are developed and prepared to meet customers’ needs and expectations.
CS.4 Customers are identified, prioritised and engaged through appropriate channels.
CS.5 Actions are planned to improve performance against objectives, and the plans are enacted and monitored.
PS.R Results against strategic objectives are measured, achieved and acted upon.

Delivery creates Impact

Relationships drive Satisfaction

CR.1 Contact with customers is managed flexibly and responsively, in support of delivery and relationships.
CR.2 Customers’ views on solutions proposed and their delivery are sought at appropriate intervals and acted upon.
CR.3 Customers’ relationships are planned and developed, with contact made at appropriate intervals.
PR.S Customers’ satisfaction with delivery and relationships is measured, achieved and acted upon.

The IDEAL Framework

IDEAL is our assessment methodology: it’s the tool we have developed to use in analysing and assessing organisations’ operations against the Improvement Framework’s Indicators. By defining the different facets of good organisation, capability and performance, and robsutly defining different maturity levels for them, IDEAL allows us to rigorously assess training organisations on their own terms.

IDEAL is an acronym, standing for the four different Maturity Concepts we use to understand and assess training organisations’ operations. IDEAL stands for Identify, Design, Execute (Evaluate, when considering Performance) and then Analyse and Learn. Together, the Maturity Concepts make up a continuous improvement cycle - they test how well you identify what you need to do, how well you do it, as well as how you align each activity with your wider operations.

	Identify: Using the organisation’s strategic objectives - its current interpretation of its mission - to identify requirements for the organisation’s shape and structure, its capability and its performance measurement.
	Design: Designing solutions which can meet operational requirements - expressed in the Indicator and in established best practice - as well as the strategic requirements as understood through Identify.
	Execute: For capabilities, putting the design into operation so that it is sustainable, well understood and supported by the right people and resources.
	Evaluate: For performance, setting and monitoring targets, sustaining trends and seeking comparisons with other organisations.
	Analyse & Learn: Monitoring the capability or performance area to identify gaps, risks and opportunities, and to investigate what variations in performance - over time or between areas - mean, to drive further improvement.

Each Maturity Concept is defined at each of five Maturity Levels. At the start is Level 1: these are initial, ad hoc operations, characterised by their lack of management. Level 5 represents the high ideal, of strategically aligned operation, focused on continued innovation and sustained success.

When we assess a training organisation against the Improvement Framework we review their operations against each Indicator. We examine their strengths and areas for improvement, and then review the against each of the relevant Maturity Concepts to identify the Maturity Level at which the organisation is operating. It is this sustained, systematic rigour which makes IDEAL a powerful tool not only in highlighting improvement challenges but also in allowing comparison and benchmarking.

Downloadable Guide

We’ve created this short guide that sets out the core knowledge embodied in the Training Excellence platform. Feel free to browse it, or else to download and/or print it out. If you’d like to get in touch, we also have hardcopies available.