It’s Friday (Wheeey)! And it is nearly Christmas (Wheeeeeeey)! So, for both of those reasons, we are going to keep our final post before Christmas a fun one. 

There’s going to be three sections to this post; each designed to do nothing more than put a smile on your face. No link to buy anything, no requesting you to sign up for anything and no encouraging you to like or follow anything. Instead, we just have these three Feelgood Friday topics for you to have a gleg (I know, ‘gleg’ sounds strange and it’s not even a word, but who cares?) through:

• Very nice feedback from some of our learners
• Some bizarre nativity scenes
• Festive animals!

Let’s start with the friendly-feedback!

Here’s a small handful of our Facebook reviews…

Geoff said;

“Fantastic opportunity to meet great folk from all professions. Learned at my own pace and set class days are very flexible. Great learning experience I can apply daily in my own vocation. Thank you Brooks and Kirk!”

Ian said;

“I would like to thank you all at Brooks and Kirk for the help and motivation to complete my education and training and cava assessor training. I found it very useful to do online in my free time as I could go back to watch the videos over again and help was only a phone call away if I ever needed it.”

Lisa said;

“Really enjoying my CAVA course. The online learning platform is so easy to use, and the quality and accessibility of the resources make the assignments much easier to understand. They have exceeded my expectations on feedback times, usually within days rather than the two weeks they give themselves. When I have had questions, the team have always been really helpful and nothing has been too much trouble. They are a great example to assessors as to how to run vocational training!
I will be returning to do my verifier’s qualification with these guys and highly recommend them.

UPDATE! 
I have finished the qualification now, and it has been excellent. The assessors day was a fantastic opportunity to gain experience completing an observation and professional discussion in a context where the trainee assessors’ needs come first. This means that as the assessor, you feel safe to try things and in asking your trainer questions without worrying about being professional in front of an apprentice and their employer. 
This is how all new assessors should be trained as you feel so much more confident at the end of it!

I cannot recommend Brooks and Kirk highly enough! Their service is excellent, the marking is fast and feedback is clear and supportive. 
I have talked at length with them on the phone about things like the new apprenticeship standards, which shows they are not just there to help you with the qualification, but are ready and willing to support you in your professional development as a whole.”

Now for some of the feedback we received via email…

Mahesh said;

“I’m super chuffed and thank you all at Brooks & Kirk for this fine opportunity with the CAVA course. It’s been an amazing experience and have recommended Brooks and Kirk to some friends who are looking to do Assessing”

Nicole said;

“Your company had been amazing and I had loved training for you. Thank you for all the support”

Shireen said;

“Brooks and Kirk provide an excellent service and support to which I will continue to recommend other too. Hopefully, in the future, I would love to undertake the IV course next”

A Bizarre Nativity

Have you seen any photos online of any bizarre Nativity scenes? Well, we have and we thought we’d share some of the best ones with you! Our personal favourites are;

Have you made a comical Nativity scene this year, or infact any previous years? Let us know and show us your photos!

Festive Animals

Now, we all love photos of cute animals, but they get even better (if that’s actually possible) when they have a touch of Christmas! 

That’s all for this year! We hope you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from all the team at Brooks and Kirk!

Research conducted earlier in the year revealed that sharing good news with others can help to improve sleep and in turn, improve health. So if you didn’t get a great night’s sleep last night, no worries! We have some good news in the form of a success story to help you to catch some z’s on this miserable hump day. And who knows, it could motivate you to start your journey to a new career!

We recently caught up with one of our past learners who completed their assessor training course with us back in 2016. Like many others who enrol onto our assessor course, Monique didn’t have to wait too long at all before landing herself a job as an assessor.  

Monique didn’t even have to finish her course before being offered a position as a Health and Social Care assessor! Here is the email that we received from Monique on the day that she received her certificate:

A big THANK YOU to all of you for making my learning journey a great experience . You were all supportive and in a strange way I will miss you all and doing my course! Odd I am. Still….. Must crack on as I have 72 learners on a programme I put together with Highfield so no time for chats. Love to all!!

Oh, and it was accompanied by this lovely CertSelfie!

When we have initial contact with prospective learners, we often get asked: “What are the chances of me gaining employment upon completion of the course?” Although we would love to be able to say to everyone “Don’t worry, you will get a job straight after you finish your course, easy, not a problem.” We would be living in a dream world if we really expected that to be the case for everyone, all the time. That being said, it’s not all that uncommon for our learners to land an assessor job that easily! Take Monique as a prime example.

But the success story doesn’t end there! Monique has since taken on a new role, heading up the Health and Social Care training at Dhunay Corps. She is running workshops, assessing on a one to one basis, observing learners in their workplace and more. Another perk to her role at Dhunay Corps is that she is now YouTube famous as well… 

A couple of weeks back we wrote an article about an independent survey which our learners were asked to complete. If that rings a bell, then you will know how incredible the results were. If it doesn’t ring a bell, then why not have a gleg now by having a read of the full post .

However, we didn’t include any of the comments that our learners added at the end of the survey and that’s where it really gets impressive! Although we don’t have the names for whoever wrote each of these comments, we are extremely grateful and thankful to all of our learners for speaking so highly of us. 

Although we may be blowing our own trumpet a tad here, we just wanted to share some of these comments with everyone. If you’re looking at training to become an assessor and you’re unsure as to whether or not you should choose Brooks and Kirk, just bare in mind these following comments. All of which came straight from the horse’s mouth. Metaphorically speaking of course. We don’t actually have any horses as learners, unfortunately…

Anyhow, they were asked, “What do you like best about your provider?” 

Here are just a small percentage of the responses we received, word for word;

The flexibility of the course duration as well as the support from assessors. The feedback is very helpful and relevant; it’s given in a timely manner. They kept in contact to ensure that I was happy pursuing my course. They can be easily contacted and the tutor support is just brilliant.

It is well managed, professional and very helpful. When I have needed extra help there has always been someone who has been able to help me. I have recommended this company.

Although they ‘teach’ online (which was what I wanted as this gives me the flexibility to study whenever I choose), I still felt they gave the ‘personal’ touch often lacking on online courses. I also felt they cared about my progress and was even phoned on a few occasions when it seemed I was unclear about some of the feedback I received from them.

Very supportive assessors and support team. Clear, easy to use virtual learning. Clear, timely feedback. Highly recommend. I am now studying with them again!

Right from the beginning they were very supportive, someone was always on the other end of the phone if help was needed. The course was well designed and clear, the two day in-house training was well planned, and all staff involved had excellent knowledge and clearly loved their jobs.

I get the feeling that we wouldn’t have received such detailed feedback from horses. So, upon reflection, it probably is handy that we don’t have any horses as learners.

If you would like to find out more about the assessor course that our learners are so complimentary about, then you may wish to have a read of our CAVA information page. 

Yes, February the 14th was over a couple of weeks back now, so we are a couple of weeks late with our public soppyness. But we just wanted to say how much we love our learners!

We felt the need to share this with everyone off the back of the findings from a recent independent survey. 

Just a couple of weeks ago, an external independent organisation conducted a survey on Brooks and Kirk’s current learners. Our response rate was significantly higher than the average for all Further Education Colleges across England and was the highest of any dedicated assessor training provider. Whilst the response rate alone was beyond our expectations, it gets better still!

All of our existing learners were asked how they felt about each of the statements listed below. Here’s how our learners reviewed Brooks and Kirk…

Over the past few months, we have received a lot of very nice messages from past and present learners on our courses. This got us thinking that we need to be sharing these loving messages with all of you. Now what better way to do so than by compiling a selection into one feel-good-Friday post?

BUT, we don’t do things by halves at Brooks and Kirk. So, rather than you just reading through a few nice comments from our learners with the sound of your kids shouting in the background, or the sound of car after car after car going past, we have picked out the perfect backing track to really set the mood for you. 

Before you go any further, in order to appreciate our ‘Feel the Love Friday’ post in its entirety, you need to hit play below. Prepare yourself… 

Now you have the smooth, mellow backing of the one and only Teddy Pendergrass, you are ready to read on!

Assessor’s Messages

To begin with, here are a few messages that our assessors have received after telling their learners that they have completed their assessor qualifications. These messages have been copied and pasted straight from our tutors’ inboxes.

Kim. H

Thank you so much for all your help!!! I’m so excited!!! Again, thank you so much X

Paul. S

Thank you so much for all the help from yourself and the team. Its been quite a ride and I feel like I have learned a lot. I am so pleased to have finally passed and look forward to a future assessing role. Thanks again

Kevin. L

Thank you for all your work and support across the tasks. I’ve just been doing another online course and it really makes me appreciate the level, clarity and responsive nature of your company in guiding through the assessments. It has been a very straight forward and organised course. Many thanks

Jodie. T

Thank you for the lovely feedback and all your help on the day of the course. Was great to put it in to practice. I just wanted to let you know as well that I am one of “those” people who have gone and got a job already!! I have been offered a regional trainer and assessor job in active leisure with Lifetime so I am well chuffed!!

What Quality Advice and Guidance can do

The next feel-good message that we received isn’t actually from one of our learners funnily enough. In fact, this lady was completing her assessor course with another provider.

Bhairavi contacted us a short while back just for some advice and support. She was enrolled onto an assessor course where she wasn’t informed that she would need access to learners. Then when it came to her needing to assess two learners in the workplace, her training organisation told her that she needed to find some learners. All they said was that they couldn’t help her and that it wasn’t their problem.

She called us up sounding extremely worried because she had no idea of where she could get access to learners to assess. She genuinely believed that she wasn’t going to be able to complete her qualification. But we had a 30-minute long conversation with her, providing her with advice and guidance on what to do to give herself the best opportunity to find learners. 

A month later, we received this email…

Bhairavi plans to come to Brooks and Kirk to train to become an Internal Quality Assurer once she has gained sufficient experience in assessing.

#CertSelfies

Finally, the last bit of Brooks and Kirk love that we would like to share with you all is a good ol’ CertSelfie. 

When learners complete their course with us, we ask if they would be happy to send us a Selfie of them with their certificate. If they don’t want to, not a problem, if they are happy to, then fantastic. So to round off our Feel the Love Friday, here is Rachel’s CertSelfies along with her accompanying message.

Now if reading all those lovely comments with the mellow sounds of Teddy Pendergrass in the background didn’t make you smile, then we don’t know what will!