What are National Occupational Standards?
National Occupational Standards aim to provide a clear description of what you need to know and what you need to be able to do to perform a job successfully. They can help with recruitment, performance monitoring, and training planning.
Creative & Cultural Skills is working with key industry partners to develop National Occupational Standards for the creative and cultural industries. We want to ensure that you have consistent and relevant guidance on how you and your staff are performing compared with other businesses in your sector.
National Occupational Standards also form the basis of occupational qualifications. For example, all the qualifications at the heart of our Apprenticeships programme are built on National Occupational Standards.
How are National Occupational Standards developed?
Our Standards are made up of individual units, each one focusing on a particular task or element of knowledge. Together these units make up a ‘suite’ of National Occupational Standards for a certain occupational area.
All of Creative & Cultural Skills’ suites of National Occupational Standards are developed through extensive work with a working group from the relevant sector. We also run public consultations on all our new or revised Standards. This is to ensure that National Occupational Standards genuinely reflect different jobs and occupations, and that they are written in a language recognised by the industry.