The Financial Services Skills Council is to launch a consultation process to help the financial services industry to plan more effectively across a wide range of activities, from recruitment and selection to training and development.
The skills council will launch the month-long consultation process on 9 February, to seek views about its revised draft industry performance standards for retail financial services.
The standards define the competences which apply to job roles or occupations, with the main change proposed being to integrate the standards into a single framework.
This will feature a set of core competence standards that apply to the skills and knowledge required of everyone in the sector.
Other standards will be grouped into clusters that represent a common function: some of these, such as the sales cluster, may apply across the whole sector, while others, such as the underwriting cluster, will be more specialised.
The structure has been simplified to make the standards easier to understand and to relate to particular job requirements.
It is anticipated that the revised standards will be made public by June 2005.
Organisations can contribute to the consultation via the Financial Services Skills Council website, where the consultation paper will be available from 9 February.
