Barry Babister from MOT Juice exposes the deeper needs of the DVSA when it comes to Continued Professional Development (CPD). Barry is a director at MOT Juice and at CCM Garages, which owns and operates five MOT bays.
Every MOT tester must do their annual MOT tester exam, and every tester should be doing their annual training, which should match the syllabus supplied by the DVSA each year. Unfortunately, however, in these days of compliance, there is even more to be done if you want to remain on the compliant side of the DVSA.
With a revised Sixth Edition Testing Guide, and the small matter of the new Testing Manual available from May 2018, there is plenty to read up on. What the DVSA is saying here is that we all need to make sure we are fully aware of scheme changes.
Section 6 of the DVSA Guide to MOT Risk Reduction covers tester competence and integrity. In this section, we can see the DVSA starting to underline the need for CPD outside of the Annual Training syllabus, and the need for evidence of ongoing training. In fairness to the DVSA, it does state ‘evidence of’, so if we are not recording our CPD, we will start to fall foul of the rules and open ourselves up to scrutiny by the organisation.
Let’s keep going. The Site Assessment Risk Scoring Guide asks if there is evidence of a regular staff training/improvement programme. It requires records of regular staff training, covering:
- New/replacement equipment
- Changes in service requirements
- New/revised working practices
- Competency assessments
So again, we can see that the Vehicle Examiner is even given guidance on checking for documented proof of your CPD during a site visit. This is where ongoing CPD comes into play. If your VTS is able to, create current training based around scheme changes and the latest Special Notices or Matters of Testing blog, and track the involvement of all of the testers, and the dates and times that they conducted this CPD.
Once you have a system in place, you need to ensure that it also covers this requirement from a Quality Management perspective. That means that if testers are found to be short on knowledge, the DVSA will want to see that you have identified the problem and put in place the necessary training to put this right. So, not only do you need a CPD system, you also need a way to manage and report upon it, to score the results of your testers, and to be able to produce documented proof of all of this, in order to keep your VTS risk score as low as possible.
If you want a ‘boxed up’ solution that covers this and more, then look no further than MOT Juice and make use of this unique promo code, which will give you some free training: ‘PMM30FREE’.
