Apprenticeship training course

Improvement specialist (level 5)

Leading the deployment of improvement strategies.

• Qualification level: 5 ; Equivalent to higher national diploma (HND).
• Typical duration: 14 months
• Apprenticeship category: Business and administration
• Maximum funding: £9,000 ; Maximum amount government will fund ; for apprenticeship training.
• Also known as:
  • Business Improvement Consultant
  • Business Improvement Expert
  • Business sustainability improvement consultant
  • Business Transformation Consultant
  • Chemical Engineer
  • Civil Engineer
  • Continuous Improvement Consultant
  • Environmental Engineer
  • Environmental improvement data analyst
  • environmental improvement engineer
  • Environmental improvement health and safety manager
  • environmental improvement manager
  • Environmental Manager
  • Geotechnical Engineer
  • Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
  • Mechanical Engineer
  • Process Excellence Manager
• Skills:
  Skills an apprentice will learn

  • Leading improvement teams: Holding team members/stakeholders to account for delivering agreed actions within an improvement project and building/maintaining appropriate stakeholder relationships inside and outside the organisation to deliver improvement project objectives
  • Strategic Deployment of Continuous Improvement: Contribute to deployment of improvement strategy, participating as an active member of the improvement community
  • Communication: Prepare and present concise proposals and plans. Capture and share progress through effective formats and channels. Use and handle questions effectively. Build rapport with others.
  • Capability Development: Train, facilitate and critique the application of tools used by improvement practitioners including tool-selection, links between tools, how they are used within a structured method, analsysis of results and presentation of recommendations
  • Project planning: Plan and manage finances, multi-stakeholder delivery and benefits realisation
  • Change planning: Design reinforcement, engagement and communication strategies
  • Principles and Methods for Improvement: Guide others on the selection of appropriate methods (eg. Practical Problem Solving, Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control, 8-Disciplines, Identify-Define-Optimise-Verify) to deliver improvements. Conduct gateway assessments to ensure suitability of projects to progress
  • Project selection & scope: Guides others on the selection and scoping of improvement projects and the intial response to product/process performance issues. Identify, scope and prioritise improvement opportunities that map to high-level organisation objectives and key value-streams
  • Process mapping & analysis: Guide others on the selection of appropriate process mapping and analysis tools. Critique improved state
  • Lean tools: Identify and analyse value-streams using appropriate methods and tools to optimise flow to customer. Develop a plan for Lean deployment within the organisation including effective and relevant performance metrics
  • Measurement: Guide others on the planning, analysis and interpretation of data collection & measurement studies including the design of tests to recreate failures & steps to diagnose/reduce short & long-term measurement variation
  • Statistics & measures: Confirm data and fit for a range distribution models. Establish predictions. Calculate confidence intervals
  • Data analysis-statistical methods: Model random behaviour and make inferences with levels of confidence. Calculate/recommend sample size. Test hypotheses for all data types. Assess input/output correlation. Generate, analyse and interpret simple and multiple predictive relationship models
  • Process capability & performance: Identify data stability/distribution issues and apply appropriate strategies to enable robust Capability Analysis. Analyse life data to establish rates and patterns
  • Root cause analysis: Make appropriate use of data to assess contribution of critical inputs/root cause(s) to product/process performance using appropriate graphical and statistical tools to draw and coomunicate conclusions
  • Experimentation & optimisation: Guide others on the planning, analysis and interpretation of experiments. Plan,conduct, analyse and optimise both full & fractional experiments
  • Data analysis – Statistical Process Control: Monitor and asses ongoing process variation and changes through chart-selection, control-limit setting, sample sizing/frequency and control-rules
  • Benchmarking: Guide others on benchmarking to support all stages of improvement projects including future-state design
  • Failure mode avoidance: Decompose complex systems in order to define main functions. Anaylse system interactions. Cascade knowledge through fault tree analysis. Create and assess design rules, standards & verification methods. Complete robustness studies to select appropriate control strategies and detection methods
  • Sustainability & control: Guide others on control and sustainability planning including methods and tools to maintain benefits, extraction of learning, replication, sharing and consolidation of new knowledge into organisational learning

Full information on Improvement specialist (level 5) is available from the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

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