| | | |
In the UK civil service, James led a team of 12 staff responsible for vocational skills and qualification development in 20 industry sectors with an operational budget of £10m. His role was to establish lead bodies from partnerships between competing stakeholders, companies, and professional bodies, whose work was accepted as being representative of the sector’s needs. His major success was to create an effective Training and Development Lead Body. The involvement of people from this professional group was key to the wider acceptance of a new system of competence based qualifications for the UK. At the same time, he introduced the practice of lead bodies being responsible for the development of their national qualifications, which had formerly been left to awarding bodies. The processes and results of this work are still being used. Secondly as a consultant in the early 90’s, he undertook skills analyses of several UK industry sectors including the quality management, marine and sea fisheries sectors. Later he was invited to lead the analysis work in NZ Telecom for establishing a revised development and performance management system. He was able to simplify the then structure of over 1200 job descriptions to a family of 45 roles. This work exceeded project expectations and led to a similar contract with Watercare Services, the Auckland water and waste authority a year later. Later in the 90’s, he was contracted by ETITO (an NZ industry training body) to bring together a collection of companies in the NZ electronic industry to develop vocational standards and qualifications for roles ranging from assembly line workers through to professional engineers. He devised a refined analysis approach that produced standards based on stable skill sets, so that the work was automatically future proofed. This functional analysis approach is applicable to all industry and business fields and yields both stable as well as the minimum number of skill standards for a given work role. The standard of work in this 4 year project was separately acknowledged by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and he was later invited to develop the replacement New Zealand Certificate in Engineering for the electrical/electronic sector. (HND equivalent qualification in the UK) In recent years, he has been working in secondary and tertiary education fields in both NZ and the UK. This has included developing the secondary curriculum for an academy school in Manchester which is heavily supported by industry sponsors; recruiting and leading a team of post graduate teachers to successfully design and deliver sub professional business courses to international students in the New Zealand higher education system; contributing to the development of an experiential assessment system for a post graduate leadership programme in Napier University, Edinburgh.
|
|
|
|
