Let’s talk competence

The professional institutions can point to their programmes of Continuous Professional Development to demonstrate that members have the required level of skill and knowledge. For the rest of the supply chain, on whose expertise those professionals rely, it’s a more complicated process.

Numerous organisations are working to produce standard documented and controlled programmes that define competence, but in a fragmented industry with multiple proprietary systems and bespoke solutions that’s a fiendishly difficult task.

As a systems house, Schüco is in a particularly tricky position. We don’t manufacture products but we supply those that do. We don’t install systems or design building structures but again, we advise those that do. We also design our own unique system solutions that require in-depth technical knowledge to apply correctly.

We constantly review the emerging solutions to the competency challenge and we concluded that the only way to ensure that our staff, our manufacturing and contractor customers and our specifying partners are competent in our systems was to design our own training programme. From this conclusion, the Schüco Academy has emerged.

The training provided by the Academy is designed on these five core principles:

1.  Attending a course doesn’t prove anything. It’s not what you attend that’s important, it’s what you learn. We test everyone to make sure they have understood and acquired the knowledge we have set out.
2. The best people to teach a system are the ones who designed it. No generic industry-wide training programme can ensure that users understand an individual system and its performance. We rely on our own engineers to have that expertise and to share it.
3. Knowledge needs updating. Regulations change, systems evolve, and innovation moves on. We’ve introduced a system of skills cards (complete with QR codes) for our fabricator customers to provide proof of the training they have undertaken and the assessments they have passed, and we have a series of RIBA-certified CPD courses to support specifiers.
4. Third-party validation is essential. We might think we’re the best in the industry, but we don’t expect our customers to take our word for that. Our programmes are overseen and independently verified by GQA Qualifications.
5. Competency begins at home: any member of staff who interacts with a customer must be competent. That runs right from the customer service team who answer the phone through the sales teams who work with the fabricators to the specification advisors who provide the technical insight to architects and engineers. We have training programmes for each skill level, driving a culture where not only is competency hard-wired but there is an expectation that competency must be demonstrated.