Like many organisations operating in and around the sector, last week we read - with considerable interest - the Government response to the House of Lords National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee report: 'A national plan for sport, health and wellbeing'.
What struck us is that so much of what’s being discussed and decided involves areas we have either comparable or direct experience of.
Four immediate requirements are apparent:
- All funded bodies require a People Plan
- Relevant bodies to develop a National Register of Coaches
- Improved Duty of Care/Safeguarding information sharing
- Improved recognition, support and development of the workforce
When asked, we always say that Competence (our app, our business) was developed for organisations who are: “compelled to care about performance”. That means those for whom performance is not just important, it is paramount.
Schools. Training Providers. Professional Sports Clubs and Leagues. The British Army.
Our app helps them sharpen their focus on improvement in the knowledge, skills and behaviours of their people. So whether it’s learners, players, teachers, coaches, governors - or even recruits in basic training, there are always common principles to develop performance.
At their most basic, the requirements detailed above can be interpreted easily. What's needed are ways of recording, storing, updating and sharing different types of information against people, groups of people and the multiplicity of organisations they may have relationships with - paid or otherwise. Understanding that isn't the difficult bit - and anyone can build a database with a front end on it.
What's much harder is managing how those groups of people interact; who gets to see, who gets to say and who gets to know what they need to. What's also hard is scale, efficiency of performance and a frictionless user experience. These factors (often more, even than functionality) are the reasons why technical solutions fail.
The key things our customers are desperate for are:
Time saved getting information (IN)
Whether you’re reviewing, assessing, self-assessing, submitting evidence of compliance, recording/completing CPD or progress towards a qualification, whatever interface you’re using must be the one best suited for the task.
The input of information might be any combination of text, image or video, in which case each of your smartphone, tablet or desktop have a strong use case, depending on the circumstances.
Meaningful insights delivered (OUT)
How to deal with the fact different organisations require different information at different times to be delivered to different people in different places?
The answer is flexibility.
Whether it’s on-demand reporting within our native smartphone/tablet app, or whether it’s interactive dashboards we’ve created within Tableau, or integration with customers’ own BI solutions; what people need is speed, accuracy and relevance. Provide the answer that people need, when they need it, where they need it.
Mapping the future for the workforce
From what we’ve learned from our conversations with key sector stakeholders, CIMSPA appear well-positioned to drive delivery of “greater recognition, support and development of the workforce”.
Their intentions around the concept of mutualism and the ‘education ecosystem’ which supports it are clear.
The idea is that it should be possible to create mapping which establishes the relationships between education products, professional standards and related job roles; each of which is constructed from collections of simple competency statements (knowledge or skills).
This will make it much easier for organisations, related stakeholders or indeed individuals themselves to gain confidence and clarity of understanding around recognition and demonstration of worth, identification of skills or compliance gaps and access to future development pathways.
Even easier, if it’s all in the palm of your hand.
We'll continue to monitor the situation.
