Tell us what you think...
City & Guilds iTQ N/SVQ
City & Guilds ITQ - the best supported ITQ in the marketplace
Choose City & Guilds ITQ for your workplace IT qualification, and you can roll all existing IT qualifications and skills into one valuable standard.
02 ITQ - not just for the workplace
04 Why choose City & Guilds ITQ?
05 Superstructure qualification
ITQ is a 'national vocational qualification', or NVQ designed to equip learners with skills for work, rather than skills that may be used or apply in non-professional or 'everyday' life.
ITQ is highly customisable, allowing you to adjust the content of the qualification to suit your requirements as well as the skills level of your chosen disciplines. So you can 'create' your own ITQ (eg, The East Cheam Electrical Factors iTQ), allowing your staff to learn and be assessed on tasks that they need to know as part of their job, and also taking into consideration any existing qualifications they have.
ITQ aims to satisfy:
- Employers' demand for more relevant IT User qualifications
- Learning providers' capacity to deliver a more creative syllabus
- Learners' need to be appropriately skilled in IT for the job they do and for these skills to be measurable and portable from job to job and company to company.
iTQ - not just for the workplace
e-skills UK, the Sector Skills Council for the iTQ, has provided clarification on the evidence that can be used for the Make Selective Use of IT.
'The iTQ evidences competence, the application of skills and knowledge in a real setting, in that it is different from other qualifications which cover only skills and knowledge. As a result evidence for the iTQ mandatory unit must be naturally occurring from IT activites undertaken for a specific and real purpose. This does not necessarily mean that candidates must be in paid employment.
The purpose and general content of the end product may be specified by the end user however the candidate must select and use IT to achieve the end product. In many situations the end product will be specified by the candidate's employer or client.
However, valid evidence can also arise from:
- the search for employment (eg CVs, job applications and emails to potential employers)
- social activities (eg club membership databases, posters and websites)
- enterprise activities (eg business plans, budgets and marketing materials)
- voluntary activities (eg cash flows, programmes and newsletters)
- learning and studying subjects other than IT (eg internet research for a geography assignment, reports/dissertations and presentations).
It is for the assessor (assisted by the expert witness where relevant) to ensure that the activities were for a real purpose.
By the very nature of IT, work activities can be carried out in a variety of locations not confined to the traditional office setting.'
As a learning provider, iTQ is a logical extension to your existing qualifications and training portfolio. As all IT User VRQs map to it, it's not like adopting a whole new framework and you may actually be surprised how simple it is to assimilate. Being able to offer iTQ means you can finally offer your clients a bespoke IT User skills qualification that has already been proven to have huge appeal to employers. With City & Guilds, you will receive all the support you need to take on ITQ, especially if you are new to NVQ style qualifications.
As an employer, the way iTQ can be customised will be highly beneficial, allowing you to decide what IT User skills you'd like to see enshrined in a qualification fit for your organisation. You will also be able to decide on the level of competence in those skills as well, because iTQ covers all existing IT User qualifications your staff may have and creates one straightforward benchmard for you. iTQ also allows you to draw meaningful analysis of the IT skills needs and strengths across your organisation. This, in turn, will make it far easier to plan skills development both organisationally and individually, which will result in cost effective spending of training and development budgets and enhanced productivity.
As a learner - working towards an iTQ with your employer means that you'll always have an IT skillset that is portable and transferable. The units of an ITQ correspond to the most frequently used and most commonly sought after IT user skills and once you've achieved proficiency in a unit, that unit will be valued and valuable to your existing employer and any future employer. Also existing qualifications such as e-Quals 07 can be converted into an iTQ without having to redo the learning and testing you have already done.
The City & Guilds iTQ is, we believe, the best supported iTQ in the marketplace. Our support services include updated information on the qualification for learning providers, learners and employers, which will be published on this website and via an email newsletter that you will be invited to subscribe to.
City & Guilds iTQ also boasts the most intuitive, user-friendly resources for learning providers wishing to deliver the qualification, and these are all made available online to accredited City & Guilds learning providers.
iTQ allows you to:
- benchmark the IT skills you require to run your business
- gather up and value your existing pool of skills (both those that carry a qualification and those that don't) and give you ways in which to evaluate and compare them all.
Most crucial is that all IT User vocationally-related qualifications (VRQs) map to ITQ. So your learners with City & Guilds e-Quals 07, CLAiT, ECDL will be able to convert to iTQ. This is why we describe iTQ as a superstructure. This mapping capacity means that it is simple for learners to evolve their hard-earned IT qualifications to a work-orientated IT qualification with no repetition or duplication of time or effort. The customisation capacity of the iTQ also allows for learners to both learn and be assessed on tasks they perform everyday.
