Toni & Guy assessors get ahead with IOEE's Nicole Race.

Nicole Race, IOEE’S Monitoring Officer, is someone who enjoys every part of her job. In essence, her role is to oversee quality assurance within the external organisations IOEE works with and ensure they meet a consistently high standard. Those external organisations often bring an element of intrigue to Nicole’s working life, and occasionally even a touch of glamour! That was certainly the case when she found herself delivering assessor training to a group of high-profile Toni & Guy professionals from around the globe.

IOEE has long worked with the world renowned hairdressers, who opened their first salon in London in 1963. Toni & Guy now deliver many IOEE programmes.These cover starting and managing your own business, social media as tool for promoting products and services, and reception duties.

The training’s main objective was to help Toni & Guy put a more rigorous structure around the IOEE qualifications they deliver. Those attending included the organisation’s UK franchise manager, an international franchise owner and a variety of business development managers responsible for training and delivery.

This was the chance for Toni & Guy’s trainers to maximise the impact of their skills, specifically their ability to conduct vocational qualification assessment effectively. Nicole travelled to London to deliver the assessor training IOEE had created specifically to meet Toni & Guy’s requirements. Two workshops had been devised – Principles of Assessment and Train the Trainer. Principles of Assessment is a detailed overview of what it is to be a successful assessor. The first requirement for any assessor is simply to be an industry expert. As hair industry professionals of many years standing, Nicole’s Toni & Guy group had this element of assessing well covered! However, they were keen to develop the other aspects of the assessor’s role, as Nicole explains:

“This session covered the assessment cycle, the role assessment plays, standards and how to judge against them, what the awarding organisation requires from you, and quality assurance.”

Meanwhile, Train the Trainer is a more practical session focussed on optimising the outcome of successful training sessions, as Nicole explains:

“I was teaching how to plan for highly effective training and looking at learning styles. It’s about using different resources to get the best out of the subject matter you’re trying to deliver. It’s also about the accommodation you’re using, the facilities you have at your disposal and the needs of the learner.”

The goal was to combine the experience and insight of Toni & Guy’s industry experts with those of a training professional – Nicole, who freely admits that the hair and beauty industry is not her specialism:

“I have no beauty industry knowledge whatsoever! I can’t even straighten my own hair! But, what I do know is assessment and how qualifications need to be set up and assessed. My job is about helping people to get the best out of themselves. We often talk about people being ‘reflective practitioners.’ You help them identify what they need to learn and then you coach them to continually reflect and improve – that’s a never ending cycle.”

Asked whether that’s the part of her job she most enjoys, Nicole enthuses:

“I Love it. Absolutely love it. I enjoy actually getting out there and meeting people, going into different organisations, seeing what they do. It’s a very vibrant, rewarding and interesting job to do!”

Toni & Guy hope that the work done with IOEE in the UK to clearly define and add value to their training offer, can be replicated by the brand internationally. Gaynor Hodge is the organisation’s National Franchise Manager for the UK and many of her team attended the IOEE workshops Nicole delivered. Speaking about them, Gaynor said:

“They were hugely beneficial in building confidence and developing new skills within our team. For the more experienced staff, the sessions represented a valuable contribution to their ongoing professional development.”