Skills testing service

Training requirements for semi‐skilled and skilled workers, and to a limited extent technicians, are mainly specific. Thus when a firm trains a person, it is generally to equip him to do a specific job or carry out a set of operations which may or may not involve an element of discretion. The usefulness of this training depends upon whether the trainee, at the end of his period of training, is able to do the jobs which he has been trained for and to take his place in the company as a productive wage earner. The literature which has been published so far by industrial training boards seems to bear this out, and the concept of the ‘module’ used by some boards illustrates this point. For many years the City and Guilds of London Institute has been connected with technical training as well as technical education and has developed practical examinations mainly in connection with further education schemes. These examinations were intended mainly to supplement education courses and in most cases not to measure ability to perform actual jobs. As such they helped to fulfil the training needs at a time when few alternatives were readily available. However, more recently, the impetus given to industrial training by the Industrial Training Act of 1964 resulting in a greater awareness of the importance of training and growing sophistication in training requirements has lead to the relevance of the practical examinations being questioned. A new situation had therefore arisen and to cater for it the Institute used its experience to develop an enterprise whose function it would be to provide a consultancy service in competence testing. We have called this enterprise The Skills Testing Service.