About the Standard


Good training develops employees’ skills and makes a difference to workplace performance. Good training providers support their customers with responsive service, ensure that their service will meet the customer’s specific business needs, and back up their delivery with the right knowledge and expertise. At their best, these training providers focus on achieving impact and are looking constantly to improve what they do.

The Training Quality Standard measures training delivery against these ideals. The Standard helps employers to know which organisations can deliver it to them; and it helps providers by offering a measure of how well their operations live up to the aspiration.

The Training Quality Standard is a robust tool, developed through comprehensive research and testing on:

  • employers’ priorities and expectations in sourcing training
  • an understanding of how good training providers meet those priorities and expectations
  • good practice in assessing organisations’ capability and performance

The Training Quality Standard is concerned with quality, impact and continuous improvement.  Quality and impact are seen as employers see them, in terms of how much and how well training contributes to their business and training goals, through:

  • responsive service delivery
  • focusing on business needs
  • development and deployment of expertise
  • continuous improvement and learning

Further details on the Training Quality Standard’s framework can be found here.

Who can apply?

The Training Quality Standard is concerned with training delivery regardless of the organisation providing it.  The Standard’s requirements are embodied in an assessment framework which is non-prescriptive – it defines the ‘what’ of training quality but leaves ‘how’ to be interpreted for each different organisation.

As a result, the Standard can be used by any organisation regardless of location, ownership or operating model – it may be a college, a university, a small independent training provider or an international business.  There’s even a version tailored to assess employers’ internal training functions.

If you wish to apply for assessment under the Standard, there are some very basic eligibility criteria you’ll need to meet. Please click here for more details.

Want to learn more?

The Training Quality Standard is tough to achieve. Its rigorous approach ensures that only the best organisations are recognised and that the mark can be trusted by employers and those delivering training. 

For employers, the Training Quality Standard is a way to identify those organisations able to deliver training to high standards of quality and impact.  If you’re an employer and want to learn more about how the Standard can help in choosing a training provider – or if you’re interested in having your internal training function assessed – then please go to our section for employers.

For those organisations providing training to employers, the Standard offers a framework to drive improvement and challenge thinking on how best to achieve impact in your employer customers’ businesses.  Further details on the benefits, the framework and the assessment process can be found in our section for training providers.