National Occupational Standards can help plan the workforce needed to deliver an organisation's, or a partnership's, strategic objectives. The units in National Occupational Standards have been developed by analysing all the activities involved in delivering the key purpose of the sector and identifying the standards required to meet it. People's jobs can, therefore, be designed, and job descriptions created, taking account of both strategic objectives and individual competences. The units also list the knowledge and skills that workers need, so they provide a good basis for developing person specifications that can be used for assessing and selecting candidates during recruitment or for promotion.
National Occupational Standards can then be used throughout the human resource management and development cycle to
Using National Occupational Standards will impact on organisational culture, as all workers work to a model of good practice and take personal responsibility for delivering a quality service in line with the organisation's quality framework. They also provide a common language for different organisations within a partnership to communicate with each other, negotiate, agree and understand each others' roles and responsibilities, to support each others' work and hold each other to account.
The pages in this section provide guidance on how you can use National Occupational Standards for these different purposes. They are not intended to be prescriptive, but to provide an outline that can be adapted to different situations.
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