How Occupational Standards Are Made — and Why Industry Must Lead

An occupational standard is a written description of what a competent worker in a particular occupation must be able to do, how well, and under what conditions. It is developed by analysing the job with the people who actually do it and the employers who hire them, then drafted, validated, endorsed and periodically reviewed. Industry must lead because a standard is a description of work, and only the people doing and paying for that work can say what it really involves.

What is an occupational standard?

In competency-based training (CBT), the occupational standard is the reference point for everything else. It answers one question: what does competent performance look like in this occupation, at this level of the national qualifications framework?

Although formats vary from one country and sector body to another, most standards share the same anatomy.

• Unit of competency. A discrete, meaningful function that a worker performs, such as installing a domestic wiring circuit, preparing a poultry house for a new flock, or maintaining a hydraulic system. A standard for one occupation usually contains several units, some core and some elective.
• Elements. The main outcomes or steps that together make up the unit. Elements describe what the worker does, in a logical sequence, without yet saying how well.
• Performance criteria. Observable, measurable statements attached to each element that define the required standard of performance. They are the sentences an assessor actually checks.
• Range or context statement. The conditions under which the competence applies: the equipment, materials, environments, customer types and variations the worker is expected to handle.
• Evidence requirements. What evidence is needed to judge that a person is competent, which aspects are critical, and whether the evidence must come from the workplace, a simulation or both.
• Underpinning knowledge. What the person must know and understand in order to perform: principles, procedures, regulations, safety and quality requirements.

Well-made standards also carry a unit code and title, a level descriptor, and increasingly the cross-cutting competences that modern workplaces expect: safety, environmental responsibility, digital literacy, and inclusive working.

Why is the standard the root document?

A CBT programme is a chain of derived documents. The curriculum takes its learning outcomes from the units and elements. The learning materials teach the underpinning knowledge and practise the performance criteria. The assessment tools collect exactly the evidence the standard demands. The certificate, finally, attests that the standard has been met.

That inheritance is the standard’s great strength and its great danger. When the standard reflects real industry practice, every derived document does too, and the qualification carries real currency with employers. When it does not, every derived document inherits the same gap, and no amount of good teaching downstream can repair it. This is why standards from industry are the first of the five pillars of TVET quality assurance, and why the shift from time-served to outcomes-based training described in our introduction to CBT is impossible without them.

How are occupational standards developed?

The process below is typical practice across the CBT systems we have worked in. Names of steps and documents vary; the logic does not. In Eljen’s own four-phase methodology this work is Phase 1, “Occupational Standards”, and it is governed by the “Industry-led” design principle.

1. Scoping. Define the occupation and its boundaries, decide which levels of the qualifications framework it will cover, and identify the sector skills body or employer group that will sponsor it.
2. Occupational analysis. Convene a panel of expert practitioners and analyse the job. Two facilitated methods dominate. In a DACUM (Developing A Curriculum) workshop, expert workers describe the duties and tasks of their occupation in their own words and the facilitator builds a chart from them. In functional analysis, the panel starts from the key purpose of the occupation and breaks it down into key functions and sub-functions until units of competency emerge. Both produce a map of the work that trainers alone could not have written.
3. Drafting. Curriculum developers, working alongside the practitioners, convert the analysis into units, elements, performance criteria, range statements, evidence requirements and underpinning knowledge. This is technical writing, and the discipline is to write what the panel said, not what the writer wishes they had said.
4. Validation by industry. The draft goes back to a wider circle of employers, practitioners and industry associations who did not sit on the original panel. They confirm that the units are real jobs, that the criteria are realistic and that nothing important is missing. Eljen’s methodology treats this as a distinct phase, “Stakeholder Validation”, with an independent expert panel and sector skills bodies signing off before anything is submitted.
5. Endorsement. The validated standard is submitted to the sector body and the regulator for endorsement. In Ghana this sits with the Commission for TVET (CTVET), established under the Education Regulatory Bodies Act, 2020 (Act 1023); institutions should check CTVET’s current requirements for format and submission.
6. Publication and review. The endorsed standard is published with a version number, a date and a review trigger. It is then maintained, not filed.

Who should be in the room?

The composition of the panel decides the quality of the standard more than any template does.

• Practitioners who currently do the job, ideally at the level being described and from a spread of enterprise sizes. They should be the majority voice.
• Employers and supervisors who hire, deploy and judge those practitioners, and who can say what is critical, what is emerging and what is obsolete.
• Trainers and curriculum developers, present as facilitators and writers rather than as authorities on the work.
• Regulator or sector-body observers, so that endorsement issues are raised early instead of at submission.
• Cross-cutting specialists on safety, greening, gender responsiveness and disability inclusion, whose input is far cheaper at the standards stage than at the materials stage.

Eljen’s role in this room is to convene, build the panel’s capacity and facilitate; the content belongs to industry. That is the model behind our occupational standards generation work with sector skills bodies and institutions.

What makes a good occupational standard?

A quick quality check before validation:

• Each unit describes a real, whole function that an employer would recognise and pay for.
• Elements are outcomes, not lesson topics.
• Every performance criterion is observable or measurable and begins with what the worker does.
• The range statement reflects the variety actually found in local workplaces.
• Evidence requirements say what is critical and where evidence may come from.
• Underpinning knowledge is limited to what performance needs, not everything a trainer knows.
• Safety, quality, environmental and inclusion requirements appear where the work demands them.
• The unit sits at the right framework level and reads consistently with neighbouring units.
• The document carries a version, a date and a named owner.

Where do standards go wrong?

Three failure modes account for most weak standards.

Written by trainers alone. When no practitioners are in the room, the standard describes the training the institution already delivers rather than the job. Units mirror existing modules, performance criteria read like examination questions, and the knowledge list swells into a syllabus.

Copied from another country without adaptation. Borrowing a well-developed foreign standard is a sensible starting point and a poor finishing point. Equipment, materials, regulations, climate, enterprise size and customer expectations differ, and a standard that ignores those differences produces graduates competent in a workplace that does not exist locally. Eljen’s “Internationally benchmarked” principle deliberately pairs international benchmarks with local grounding for this reason.

Never reviewed. Work changes; a standard that is not reviewed silently becomes a description of the past. Practitioners then stop respecting the qualification, and assessors begin to improvise. A review trigger and a named owner are the cheapest insurance a sector body can buy.

Other recurring problems include units so broad that no assessment can cover them, units so narrow that they describe a single task, and criteria that are not observable and so cannot be assessed consistently.

How does a standard flow into a CBT curriculum?

Once endorsed, the standard becomes the source for Phase 2 of the methodology, “Programme Development”, in which standards are translated into unit specifications, learning materials, assessment instruments and marking guidelines. The table shows the typical line of descent.

Nothing in the right-hand columns should appear that cannot be traced to the left-hand column, and nothing in the left-hand column should be left without a home on the right. That traceability is what allows an assessor in one region and a verifier in another to reach the same judgement, and it is the basis of the competency-based assessment that gives the qualification its credibility. It is also why Eljen’s CBT programme design service starts from occupational analysis rather than from an existing syllabus.

A standard is a living agreement

An occupational standard is best understood not as a document but as an agreement between industry and the training system about what competence means.

If your sector body or institution is preparing to generate or revise occupational standards and would like to talk through the process, you are welcome to contact us.