Section B: Putting National Occupational Standards to Work

National Occupational Standards can be used for a wide range of purposes throughout the people management and development cycle, as well as to support team and partnership development, quality assurance and the development of organisational culture and competence.

National Occupational Standards can help plan the workforce needed to deliver an organisation's, team's or partnership's strategic objectives. The units in the Legal Advice National Occupational Standards have been developed by analysing all the activities involved in providing independent information and advice and identifying the standards of performance required. People's jobs can, therefore, be designed, and job descriptions created, taking account of both strategic objectives and individual competences. The units also list the knowledge and skills that workers need, so they provide a good basis for developing person specifications that can be used for assessing and selecting candidates during recruitment or for promotion.

National Occupational Standards can then be used throughout the people management and development cycle to:

  • Identify what people new to posts need to find out and what skills they need to develop during their induction period
  • Provide workers with guidance on what is expected of them and help them perform in line with the standards
  • Develop objectives with individual workers and teams and support them in improving their performance and achieving their objectives
  • Assess whether workers are performing to the required standards, and if not where the problems may lie
  • Identify learning needs, design training and development activities and evaluate the impact of training and development on the individual worker's knowledge and skills, on their performance and on the achievement of strategic objectives
  • Recognise competent performance through feedback, certification or reward
  • Provide a clear framework so that individuals can plan, manage and evaluate their own continuing personal and professional development
  • Help individuals understand what is involved in new posts they might like to apply for, what competences they could bring to these posts, and what new knowledge and skills they would need to develop
  • Prepare individuals to take over from others when they leave or retire, and select the right individuals for the jobs

Using National Occupational Standards will impact on organisational culture and competence, as all workers work to a model of good practice and take personal responsibility for delivering a quality service in line with the organisation's quality framework. They also provide a common language for different organisations within a partnership to communicate with each other, negotiate, agree and understand each others' roles and responsibilities, to support each others' work and hold each other to account.

It should be clear by now that National Occupational Standards can influence almost every aspect of delivering legal advice services, and the prospect may appear intimidating. There is no need, however, to be overwhelmed by the work involved. You can start in a very small way, for example by using step-by-step guide 5 Personal Performance. By taking five simple steps, an advice worker can benchmark their own performance against the standards and, if necessary, develop their knowledge and skills in line with best practice. In this way, the individual and the organisation can be confident they are delivering quality services. It is also fairly straightforward to map job descriptions to National Occupational Standards (see step-by-step guide 2), thus providing each member of your team with a clear description of what is required of them in terms of best practice.

Many organisations already have well-developed systems for recruiting, developing, managing and retaining staff. The introduction of National Occupational Standards does not require a root-and-branch review of all these systems. Using the checklists below, you will be able to see how the standards can enhance existing systems, for example by providing clear and transparent criteria for the selection of new recruits (step-by-step guide 3, below) or defining objectives for training and development programmes (step-by-step guide 8). As the standards become more widely used throughout the Legal Advice field, you will find that training courses - both those provided in-house and those offered by external training providers - will become more closely aligned to the National Occupational Standards, making it easier to select learning opportunities that accurately meet the development needs of staff and volunteers.

If, on the other hand, your organisation does not have established systems for people management and development, you will find this section invaluable for helping you set up these systems in line with best practice.

The step-by-step guides in this section provide guidance on using the National Occupational Standards for the full range of staff and organisational development purposes. They are not intended to be prescriptive, but to provide an outline that can be adapted to different situations.