Workplace assessments take place in real time and must be conducted during a real life working task. This differs from a vocational assessment which is conducted during any training based activity when a person is not actively working in their role.
What is the Assessment?
In this video example we have Nick who is about to run a Level 3 Award in Education training course at the Train Aid headquarters in Surrey. As part of Nick’s role before he starts the course he conducts a risk assessment on the premises. The risk assessment helps identify any hazards that are present, how they may cause harm and how then to minimise that harm.
Your Role
In this example imagine yourself as either the candidate assessor studying towards a Level 3 Assessing qualification, or as a fully qualified assessor within the workplace. Your role would be to observe Nick carrying out his risk assessment. A pre briefing would have taken place prior to the assessment starting and you would provide feedback to Nick post assessment.
As the assessor you can imagine yourself standing as if you are the camera. You would have a workplace assessment template document which you would fill out whilst walking around the building with Nick.
The Criteria
The cornerstone of any good assessment is the criteria within it. An assessment against no criteria isn't really an assessment because there are no quantitative means to measure whether it has been a success or needs improvement.
In this example Nick has used an internal risk assessment document as his criteria. This has been mapped out prior to the course being run at the centre and was designed with the safety of the learners, teachers and visitors on the premises.
As the assessor you would include the criteria points within your own assessment template. These can then be cross checked as you walk around the building during the observation.
Trip Hazard
The benefit of doing any risk assessment is to identify potentially dangerous hazards and then to come up with a solution to minimise that hazard. Nick’s thorough approach to his risk assessment helped him identify a short HDMI cable that had potentially become a trip hazard. His solution was to make a change to a longer cable and negate the risk of someone tripping over the cable.
The benefit of the actual assessment is to be there to see Nick identify and deal with the hazard. This demonstrated his knowledge and competence within the workplace, which can be discussed, alongside any action points in the post assessment briefing.
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