Study Skills

In order to be able to undertake an award effectively, it is important to plan the time and resources effectively. This page is designed to help you achieve this.

Creating Time

Try to plan a chosen day or the week ahead to see where you can fit time in to progress with your award. It may be that you can spare a couple of hours or indeed half an hour to look at your award maybe during your lunch break, one afternoon, an arranged time with your assessor or just before you go to bed.

It will be important for you to create time to write up your evidence, so try to choose somewhere that is quiet. It may be possible to arrange a time with your manager to work in a quiet room, ask a friend if you can visit them to take some 'time out' away from others, or early in the morning/before you go to bed when there are no distractions. If a colleague is also doing an award, maybe you could arrange a mutual time so you can both get together to talk about the award and help each other.

Collecting Evidence

As NVQs are workbased qualifications, you are learning new skills 'on the job' that can be used as evidence for your award. Try to collect evidence of good practice in the workplace and put these together in a folder. It may be that once your work day has finished you could spend a few moments reviewing the day and activities you have been involved in to see if they meet any of the units in your award. If they do, write them down.

If you have done a task at work where evidence can be used for your award, ask a colleague if they would mind providing you with a 'witness testimony' where they can state what they have seen you do.

It all seems so hard!

This is common. You are not the only one to feel like this, it has nothing to do with your abilities! NVQ language is not easy and this will probably be the first time you have undertaken any study since leaving school. Your assessor will be able to guide you with your award and once you have your first unit completed, you will start to understand how they are put together. It is worth remembering that as a workbased qualification - you are already doing the standards, you just need to produce evidence against the award standards to gain national recognition.

Arrange Time with your Assessor

They are there to guide you. They will observe your practice and give you feedback on the award plus good practices you have adopted and any areas that need improvement. They will look at your work against the award and help you to plan which units to complete first.