View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

PART ONE: LEARNING TODAY
My view is that, alongside establishing the purpose of actions and the principles behind
them, we need to increase the hard technical knowledge base of housing staff and be
less prescriptive about process. This will allow staff to use their judgement to deal with
the variety of circumstances that customers present. It will help them to manage risk
and to find creative solutions that fit the needs of the customer as opposed to
consistently applying the same procedure to everyone on every occasion.
Many organisations have also made the customer journey more complex by designing
the service on the false assumption that the majority of issues are simple and can be
dealt with by an unqualified and often undeveloped front line; leaving the more
complex issues to be handed over to fewer more experienced officers. In fact I suspect
that few issues are ever that simple, and a lack of technical knowledge makes even the
most simple issues complex.
What do your staff actually know?
I am not sure that many organisations routinely evaluate the true knowledge base of
their existing staff and instead have developed their practice along the lines outlined
above. I am arguing that we need to firstly evidence what our existing staff actually
know, and develop training that delivers on the technical gaps. Extensive recruitment of
people with the ‘right behaviours and attitudes’ without a programme in place to
develop their technical knowledge will compound the problem. Even the recruitment of
graduates needs some form of follow-up training and development focusing on the
development of technical knowledge.
This is a challenge however when we look at the knowledge of existing teams and how
this can be raised over time. Historically, the CIH professional qualification leading to full
Chartered Membership of CIH has been seen as a long and intensive programme
(reflective in size and duration with many analogous programmes leading to
membership of professional bodies operating in the built environment and community
sectors). Uptake of programmes leading to CIHCM is not universal. It is not routinely
asked for as an essential requirement for front line staff at recruitment and if it were I’m
sure that many organisations would rapidly find themselves with a recruitment crisis.
A majority of organisations cannot afford to send large numbers of staff on this
qualification in any one year both in terms of cash or time. This situation has been made
worse in recent years by hikes in tuition fees. On the other hand, few induction
programmes or day training courses ever get past the basics. The extent to which staff
understand or can apply the learning from these courses is probably not routinely or
independently evaluated, except perhaps by increasing scrutiny by managers.
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