At Merit Skills, we pride ourselves on being able to tailor our Work Based Learning programmes to both the business and the individual. Our Assessors are vocationally competent and have worked in various job roles to be able to help you through the course's as well as offer insight and Information, Advice & Guidance (IAG). Our Assessors are also CAVA/A1/TAQA qualified as a minimum and have many years experience in the field.

The Work Based Learning, or Adult Apprenticeships as they are more commonly known, are a Government funded qualification accredited by City & Guilds and, in some cases, The Institute for Leadership & Management (ILM). Being Work Based Learning, this allows us to deliver the qualification to you in your place of work, with your employers approval, and cut out the need to attend a college or classroom based session. Everything is planned in advance and a time frame set out based on your own needs and current skill and knowledge set.

The courses currently available are (click below for more information):

Our courses come with Maths and English Functional Skills as standard, unless you have previously completed, and been certificated (which can be shown to the Assessor), GCSE Maths & English grades A-C at any point. This exempts you from completing these again. If you have but cannot prove this, Functional Skills will need to be completed. Many of the courses also come with a knowledge based Technical Certificate, which is assessed via 1 or more tests with the Assessor, and proves overall knowledge of the subject/course.

The course structures have a minimum time frame embedded in them, set out by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and City & Guilds, who are the Awarding Body. For Level 2 qualifications these are 10 months, and for Level 3 qualifications these are 14 to 16 months. Units for each course are chosen by you, and your employer if they wish, to enable the Assessor to match what you do to the units you have chosen and be able to assess these competently. The main way that the Assessor will gather evidence is through an observation of you doing your day-to-day job role and will gather any missing evidence either through a reflective account, witness statement, questioning or professional discussion, all of which will be discussed and planned prior to completion, to allow time for preparation. The Assessor will visit you in your workplace once every calendar month for approx. 90 minutes to complete the pre-agreed parts of the qualification, and will have expected you to have completed at least 1 hour per week of work in your own time either at home or in the work place to allow you the opportunity to complete work set in the interim.

All work generated by yourself can be uploaded onto our e-portfolio website for ease of marking and can be accessed from any computer. The Assessor can then mark this quicker to help aid you in the highest quality of work being accepted and submitted and keeping the additional work at face-to-face visits to a minimum, making sure that any disruption to your employers business is kept to a minimum; a standard we apply to everyone and strictly adhere to. We always attempt to keep any inconvenience to the business and your employer to a minimum, to allow for a smooth completion of the course and transition from work to learning and back to work.

After successful completion, your work will be checked by the Internal Verifier/Internal Quality Assurance (IV/IQA) to make sure that the evidence generated meets the required standards, which will have been checked by the Assessor prior to submission to the IV/IQA. Once this is accepted, certificates will be generated and the course will be completed.