Director of Standards and Qualifications with e-skills UK

From 1998 to September 2013 employed by e-skills UK - the Sector Skills Council for IT (User and Professional) and Telecommunications. Lead responsibility for the UK National Occupational Standards (NOS), vocational qualifications and apprenticeship frameworks covering these industry sectors.

In early 2012 led a week-long trip to Malta to provide training on the adoption and implementation by the Maltese government of the UK NOS for development as their own competency framework for IT Professionals. Developed NOS and apprenticeship frameworks for Information Security in 2012/13

Extensive experience in working across qualification and standards frameworks within the UK (SFIA, QCF, SCQF and CQFW) and Europe (e-CF and EQF).

Previous project leads:

• ♦ Development of the Sector Qualification Strategy and associated Action Plans
• ♦ e-skills UK participation in the Test and Trials of the Qualifications and Credit Framework for England
• ♦ Review and revision of NOS and Apprenticeship Frameworks for IT Professionals and IT Users - breaking new ground in the field of NOS by adopting radically new approaches to presentation and content
• ♦ Innovative and flexible qualification structure (now branded as the ITQ) developed for IT user qualifications

The outcomes of these projects have been extremely well received and have been regarded as a model for developments in other sectors.

Previous experience

From 1994 to 1998 self-employed IT Implementation, Development and Training Consultant. This involved two main areas of activity firstly providing I.T. related services to clients and secondly acting in various capacities in the educational and vocational training fields.

I.T. Services Provision of a variety of services to clients ranging from end users personal and business) through to OEMs. Worked both directly with own clients and also provided specialist support on behalf of software and hardware suppliers. Services which I provided ranged from pre-sales support through to systems troubleshooting. The types of end-user correspondingly varied from small manufacturing, commercial and professional firms to large governmental organisations.

Education and Vocational Training. External Verifier for the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) (formerly the Scottish Vocational Education Council (SCOTVEC) duties included visiting establishments such as schools, colleges and training centres which delivered courses at modular or Higher National (HNC/D) levels to verify the assessment procedures used. This took place as part of an overall Quality Assurance scheme ensuring that national standards are met. Centres were also visited to assess, in terms of equipment, resources and staff, their potential to deliver courses.

Partly as a result of this experience appointed (in August 1994) National Development Officer (Computing) by SCOTVEC (now SQA) with remit to review and revise the computing and IT provision at Higher National level. This involved redesigning the awards at HNC & HND level together with rewriting and updating the individual units making up the awards. The project was completed with the new materials validated in July 1995 with all of the Scottish FE colleges commencing by the academic year 1996-7. These units range from systems engineering topics including software development, project management and programming languages to more hardware orientated topics such as data communications and network technology.