Why Training Excellence?

We call Training Excellence an improvement platform.  By that, we mean that we can offer all of the tools, knowledge, materials and support your journey to Training Excellence - to being an Excellent Training Organisation.

This starts with diagnosis: using the Improvement Framework to understand, assess and diagnose critical improvement issues.  But the same Improvement Framework, especially alongside IDEAL, also allows us to move the discussion on - to how you can get better results, and maximise the impact you have on your customers.

Where can Training Excellence help you?

	Strategy: strategy is the bridge between your organisation’s missions and its operations.  We can help you to better understand your market through robust analysis; we can help you to think differently about who your customers are and what your value proposition is. Our team are experienced in distilling options and in facilitating decision-making.
	Relationships: relationships are where you network with your customers, creating and managing demand for your products and services.  We can help you think about the customer journey you create, and to map the processes through which you make a reality.  Once understood, we can help you measure your effectiveness, cut out waste and add value.
	Delivery: delivery draws on your products and services to create benefits for customers. Mapping processes can help here, but what we focus on above all is the steps needed to reshape around impact - better understanding each customer’s needs, better specifying your solutions, and being sure to review the benefits you deliver.

As an improvement platform, Training Excellence applies support in different ways at different points to help you gather momentum on your Journey to Training Excellence.

To start the conversation about improvement and opportunity, we can assess your organisation: working with you to candidly, positively identify and prioritise the critical improvement issues.  But change often needs buy-in at every level in the organisation, and for that reason, we recognise both the commitment and the achievement of Training Excellence, to give everybody in the organisation goals to work towards.

For most training organisations, the journey means more than just identifying improvement issues - it’s about working out how to turn them into an opportunity.  Here too we can help, offering the practical, objective advice and support needed to work through the options and deploy sustainable, innovative solutions.

3 steps to Excellence

A journey to Training Excellence starts with candid, positive assessment - homing in on your organisation’s key strengths, but also distilling the areas for improvement which must be tackled if you are to turn your ambitions into reality.

Assessment is about understanding, not tripping up.  If we don’t understand our organisation’s problems - not just their symptoms, but their causes - then we can’t take action to solve them.  With Training Excellence, assessment is strictly in confidence between us - our experienced assessors are there to help you, and no one else.

Assessment and diagnostic options

We’ve developed three assessment models, of progressively wider scope and deeper diagnosis, to help all training organisations better understand their needs.  If you’re starting off in your journey to Training Excellence, we recommend the Organisation Healthcheck as a short, sharp challenge which can help to highlight the big issues early on.  You can then progress to the Key Process Review and the Capability and Performance Assessment when you need further analysis:

	For training organisations just starting their improvement journey Your Assessor will probe your ambitions, your priorities and your approach to understanding and serving the needs of your customers.  You will receive a summary report and advice on your organisation’s definition, clarity of purpose and readiness for improvement.  You’ll get advice on how best to proceed with your journey to Training Excellence.
	For those training organisations looking to understand and prioritise their improvement issues Your Assessor will work with you to explore how your mission translates into robust capabilities, and how you measure and understand your performance.  You receive a report identifying strengths and critical improvement issues, and an improvement plan with a recommendation on your readiness for Capability and Performance Assessment.
	For those training organisations looking to analyse and benchmark their operations and the results they achieve Two Assessors will look at how every aspect of your operations and the results that you achieve.  You receive a report on strengths and areas for improvement across all twenty indicators in the Improvement Framework.  The report will also have a thematic summary, recommendations on improvement priorities and an analysis of scores assigned by your Assessors using the IDEAL framework.

Commitment and Recognition

With Training Excellence, a key tool for driving improvement within the organisation is clear, independent recognition.  We recognise your progress at two levels:

• By submitting to external assessment at any level, you become an organisation Committed to Training Excellence.  For an Organisation Health Check, you are recognised as such for six months; completing a Key Process Review or a Capability and Performance Assessment adds a further twelve months to the status.
• Those completing a Capability and Performance Assessment and scoring sufficiently highly across the Improvement Framework demonstrate their readiness to be Recognised Training Excellence Organisations, able to carry the Training Excellence stamp for two years.

 More information on what Commitment and Recognition mean can be found on Why Recognition?.

Starting your journey

Training Excellence is an aspiration more than anything else - one that we can all gain from, and one that demands that we start to work towards it sooner, rather than later.  That journey might start with a bit of reflection, some initial assessment, or some improvement advice.  Whichever it is, we are happy to help you find the right way to make a start on your journey.

Our approach in offering Training Excellence starts from a simple proposition: every organisation is different, and every organisation needs its own particular journey to Training Excellence.  That’s why, here on this website, you can find a range of background information - but we can also talk you through a lot more.  Here are some of the options you might want to pick up:

• Get the book if you want to learn more about Training Excellence - and maybe start by thinking about how your organisation compared.
• Get an Organisation Healthcheck if you want to take stock of your current position and begin to sketch out your future journey to Training Excellence.
• Get a consultation on a particular improvement issue you know you need to tackle, and would like an independent view on where and how to start.
• Get a Key Process Review if you want to explore your Strategy, Delivery and Relationship capabilities, and surface the key issues which you’ll need to tackle soon.
• Or, if you know you’re ready, get straight into a Capability and Performance Assessment, to get an objective, independent analysis across all your operations and outcomes.

In the coming months we’ll be adding more content and publications through this website, and we’ll also soon be posting details of some workshops you can attend to find out more about Training Excellence but also to investigate some of the key issues facing many training organisations in improving against the five Principles of Training Excellence.

If you aren’t sure where to start, or just have a question to begin with, please do get in touch.  You can call Andy Currie or Raj Patel at CFE on 0116 229 3300, or else e-mail them on the ‘Contact us’ form above. We’ll be happy to talk through all of your questions and concerns, and arrange the right next step for you, whenever you’re ready.