Every Learner is Different | James’ Story
About James
In James’ free time, he spends time with his 3 children. Doing family things, such as days out.
Life before Brooks and Kirk
James has been in the motor vehicle industry for 20 years now. James, unfortunately, had an accident in 2019, which made it hard to do his physical job, however, he started to look into becoming a trainer.
Finding Brooks and Kirk
Wanting to become a fully qualified assessor, James spent about a month researching different training providers online. James said that Brooks and Kirk stood out to him, as they were well-reviewed and had all the correct affiliations.
“My biggest concern was, was the certificate I’m doing a proper certificate… You do see quite a few (companies) and they’ll stick the word diploma in there and you’re like, oh, what’s happening? But obviously, the Brooks and Kirk one, when it came down to it was the proper City and Guilds (qualification). I saw that as one of the big draws to yourselves.”
James went further on to explain that;
“The fact that you provided the learners was a big, big thing. There’s a couple of other companies I did look at, although they offered the proper qualification, you have to find your own learners, which from where I was coming from made it quite difficult.”
Course Review
“The support was very very good, some of the covered topics were a bit out of my normal expertise but the support, especially from Dan, was really good. The advice and guidance was brilliant. Whenever I rang up, my issues were sorted there and then someone got back to me very quickly, and the email responses were very quick, so the support system was very good.”
“I’d definitely recommend you. The whole experience is really, really good. I think the biggest thing with Brooks and Kirk especially because I came from an industry where I wasn’t in a teaching environment or an assessing environment as such…
Review left on Facebook
Life after the Assessor Course
We originally had a chat with James about his future plans. He had set his sights on establishing his own company delivering training in the health and safety sphere. One year later we decided to reach out once more and see where his qualifications and aspirations had led to:
“September last year I set up my own company doing remote-operated vehicle pilot competencies. We actually only just started trading properly about a month ago and I’m just waiting now for my professional body membership to come through before we try to scale it up a little bit, but that should be in two or three weeks. The next phase from that is in April – May time I’ve got a first aid instructor course, so I’ll also be doing first aid qualifications as well.”
“I’ve taken three people through my qualification recertification process in the last few weeks and it’s getting quicker each time you do it”
James’ Advice
“Just go for it. Speak to Brooks and Kirk to ensure they are enrolling on the correct course and just go for it, the support is there and the way of learning is relaxed so it’s good.”
James’ Advice to Fletchling Entrepreneurs
Now that James had officially begun carrying out the role as an IQA and Assessor, we asked for advice targeted towards people looking to establish their own training provider. Nothing beats the insights of someone with industry insider experience. If you are serious about starting your own training provider, speak to our experts.
“Say someone sends me in a competency pack for IQA’ing and then I’ve got evidence which isn’t actually within the criteria, but you start reading into that too much because it’s additional to what they need. Then you can suddenly find yourself, you’re spending an hour looking at something that’s not relevant. Whereas if you know that you are looking for certain types of evidence or certain wording…, you look through for that rather than falling off track with something that might not actually be toward the qualification.”
“Make sure that you’re happy with that process. How everything flows from receiving the assessment through to the assessor, the IQA, and to the point where you’re going to either claim or issue a certificate”
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Steve is a Chartered Manager and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.
He provides Educational Consultancy to the 19+ sector as well as being an Assessor, IQA, EPA and Digital Marketing Professional. When not doing any of these he finds time, every now and then, to write blogs and articles.