City & Guilds doesn’t just have the distinction of being one of the largest awarding organisations in the UK. It’s also one of the most trusted in end-point assessment (EPA).
When City & Guilds has been responsible for 1 in every 10 EPAs completions just in the last academic year, it has needed a well-oiled EPA machine to manage every standard, support every apprentice, and respond to every change that EPA is prone to on a daily basis.
We caught up with Rebecca Hollamby, EPA Partnership Manager at City & Guilds, to understand what happens behind the scenes at one of the most influential skills organisations in the UK – and why they have trusted epaPRO to deliver over 75,000 EPAs.
Rebecca, can you tell us about your role at City & Guilds?
Certainly. I’m one of three EPA Partnership Managers here at City & Guilds. It is quite a fluid role, but my main aim is to make sure that end-point assessment runs as smoothly as possible.
I liaise with assessors (IEPAs), the booking team, associate management teams, sales teams, and, of course, with many of our customers directly.
What does a day in the life of an EPA Partnership Manager look like?
There’s no ‘typical’ day, but my goal every day is to be as proactive as possible in growing our EPA provision.
This may be working with colleagues to support pitches for new standards to customers, helping new learners through the EPA process, or training customers in providing support materials to learners through epaPRO.
We’re responsible for over 60 apprenticeship standards, and they don’t stand still. Whether it’s trailblazer groups tweaking Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours (KSBs), or our need to build new products in epaPRO and train IEPAs, EPA is in a constant state of change, and we need to keep up with it.
What are some of the standards that City & Guilds specialises in?
Our sectors are as broad as construction, engineering, automotive and building services. We work very closely with the Hair & Beauty sector and are involved in Business and Management skills, too.
The biggest change we have seen recently is the surge in digital skills, where Individual Learner Record (ILR) starts and volumes across 11 different standards have soared. It’s a reflection of the way the world is going.
How did you get into end-point assessment personally?
I have worked with City & Guilds for over 15 years, but I have been in further education roles across sales, events and managing local colleges, prior.
However, since EPA is still quite 'young', I have been involved in it since the start. It sounded exciting to be involved in something new when the transition from framework was taking place.
To put that into context, City & Guilds delivered the very first EPA – a golf greenkeeper apprenticeship – five years ago. In June of this year, we delivered our 75,000th EPA.
What do you feel about end-point assessment in your experience with it?
It’s always changing, and while there are improvements to be made to the model and to the levy, I fundamentally support EPA. City & Guilds work hard to keep it on the skills agenda.
With EPA, learners come out better prepared for work, and there are more positive changes on the way, such as EPA having UCAS equivalency from September, which will encourage more people to do apprenticeships.
Of course, retention is the other side of the coin, and we need to not only have more people on apprenticeships, but sticking the course, too – because at the end of the day, apprenticeships transform lives.
So, where does epaPRO fit into City & Guilds’ EPA journey?
We have used epaPRO for the past 4 years, and like many other providers did when EPA first started, we were using a custom platform.
We quickly realised that the time and investment needed to keep a bespoke platform up-to-date was impossible to manage. Our goal for any solution was to make admin manageable, and improve our customers’ (and apprentices’) journeys as a result.
We weren’t the first to adopt epaPRO, but we had heard a lot of positive feedback from other EPAOs, so that’s why we got in touch with Skilltech in the first place.
What did City & Guilds need to do to embed epaPRO at your organisation?
One of the most significant challenges was that, as a large EPAO and awarding organisation, epaPRO needed to integrate with the legacy and professional services platforms we depend on.
This was to ensure every vital bit of data, from invoicing to learning is fed into and out of the platform through API bridges. Equally, we also need our partner colleges to be able to manage full-time, commercial learners and EPA learners seamlessly, too.
How did Skilltech help you make the transition to start using epaPRO?
In the main, simply by being receptive. They are willing to listen to customer feedback, hear out our ideas, and build on them.
They always have been throughout our relationship, and it goes from strength to strength when they showcase new features, like EPA milestones or systems for managing booking windows, and ask for feedback that they go on to implement.
Is that the thing that you would say epaPRO helps you the most with?
Partly, but it’s the fact that it is so easy to use, and the visuals it provides for data are so clear.
We have a 20-strong booking team who use epaPRO all day, but you don’t need to be an expert. What we tell our teams and customers is that it is impossible to break.
If you put the wrong learner through gateway or upload the wrong document, it’s so easy to fix, so the simplicity really is its greatest asset.
Lastly, has that been reflected in the feedback you have received about epaPRO?
Yes. When we talk to our partner training centres, they remark at how easy it is to find learners, access data and generate their own reports easily.
It’s a system that does a lot of work, but is simple to use. Fundamentally, it’s a system that is so customer-centric and well-known that it helps our customers win business by having it.
We would like to thank Rebecca for her time.
Do City & Guilds’ challenges sound like your challenges? EPAOs of all sizes trust epaPRO to deliver seamless apprentice journeys – reducing admin, and automating all of your most time-consuming tasks.
If you don’t use epaPRO, you might know what you are missing – so why not book a demo to see just how it can transform EPA delivery at your organisation?
