Resources for training professionals

The NHS training community and the Training Quality Improvement (TQI) team have jointly developed a set of standards and supporting guidance, tools and templates. These provide support to trainers and training managers in designing, delivering and evaluating their training. A self-assessment tool has also been developed so that NHS training services can evaluate how well they are performing against the Education and Training Standards.

The TQI team facilitates the NHS IT training professionals community where NHS trainers and training managers can share good practice and documents with their peers, ask questions about personal and professional development and access toolkits and other NHS-specific information. Registration is required and membership is by request only (for trainers employed in health and social care).

Toolkits

Free resources are available on our NHS IT Training Professionals community to training staff working in health and social care (membership by request):

• Why Training Matters - tools to help training teams demonstrate how they add value and provide cost effective training to their organisation.
• Train the New Trainer - a set of resources aimed at developing new trainers. They include lesson plans and slides to run the sessions, as well as exercises and hand-outs for participants.
• Training Manager - signposts to useful resources (national and local) for professional and career development.
• Supplier Training Requirements - developed to help health and social care organisations negotiate training provision with their suppliers; provides a recommended set of requirements which could be used to form a basis for a contract or service level agreement.
• Qualifications Matrix for trainers and training managers.

The NHS eLearning website brings together the various national tools and resources to support eLearning in the NHS:

• Readiness toolkit: a self-assessment and improvement resource. It provides easy to use benchmarking tools, advice, guidance and resources that allow NHS organisations to independently review and enhance their eLearning capability
• Repository: a library of available eLearning resources, ranging from simple graphics through to presentations, papers and full eLearning courses. It includes a catalogue of eLearning content developed and shared by a wide variety of NHS trusts, guidance on how to access existing content and how to upload new content for sharing
• ESR eLearning: all NHS employees with an electronic staff record (ESR) can access free of charge eLearning courses written for the NHS
• eLearning for Healthcare: provides free, high quality eLearning for the training and education of the healthcare workforce across the UK

Generic job profiles were agreed with an NHS expert reference group and outline the skills and experience needed for the different roles within a training team.

The IT Skills Pathway provides access to customisable training and assessment products. These cover the full range of competencies for users of the main Microsoft Office products, from basic through to advanced.

It has been developed to provide an officially recognised route of learning and certification for the whole workforce and includes "just in time" training via a searchable resource tool.

Its purpose is to encourage everyone working with IT to review their current IT skills and knowledge against recognised standards, determine what their skill gaps are and then identify their current and future training requirements based on the products that are available.