Blueprint for Excellence - currently recruiting Steering Group Members

The competitive nature of food manufacturing makes it difficult to share best practice and even more difficult to see what the highest levels of job performance look like.

 If you’ve no yardstick, how can you be sure you’re not settling for second best? What exactly should you do to raise your game and what level of skills do your staff need to aim for, to achieve outstanding professionalism and productivity.

Backed by some of the UK’s largest food companies, Blueprint for Excellence will quantify and describe the precise levels of skill and knowledge that encompass individual best practise in 30 key job roles - providing a template of replicable standards capable of professionalising the industry.

Blueprint for Excellence is being managed by Improve, the skills council for food and drink manufacturing. It will utilise the experience of 50 of the industry’s best-performing companies and work closely with 30 of them to produce best practice job profiles for over 30 common roles selected through desk research, peer nomination and Trade Association input.

Working to an industry steering group, the Blueprint framework will be researched and signed off in 2012 with a pilot and test over 2013 and roll out and evaluation in 2014. Blueprint for Excellence will cover both craft-based job roles and those in modern, often highly-automated, production and processing environments. It will consist of industry-defined standards of excellence spanning:

• Job-specific technical knowledge & skills
• Technical competence
• Compliance
• Functional Skills
• Manufacturing Excellence
• Behavioural attributes

If you would like to be involved in Blueprint for Excellence steering group please contact Faith Castle: f.castle@foodanddrink.nsacademy.co.uk