National Occupational Standards (NOS)

The NOS units provided here are with the kind permission of FDQ Ltd.  NB: other sets of fish and shellfish NOS exist and are used in Wales and Scotland.  These NOS are part of a wider food and drink framework of standards developed by the National Skills Academy Food and Drink, and previously by the Sector Skills Council “Improve Ltd”, and before that the Food and Drink Qualifications Council, FDQC.  During the more than 30 years of NOS development and improvement, Seafish has been an active partner in all of this work.

For many years fish and shellfish NOS where at the heart of seafood apprenticeships across all of the UK.  Independently of their use in apprenticeships they represent a valuable resource for anyone involved in training in the seafood industry.  

How do they work? 

The fish and shellfish NOS are made up of units that can be mixed amd matched to form an apprenticeship programme, or used as the framework around which to develop your own training materials, programme or bespoke qualifications.

There are four types of units:

  •  Occupational knowledge units (OK) – what someone needs to know to do their job competently in their workplace.
  •  Occupational skills units (OS) – what someone needs to be able to do in their workplace to be considered competent.
  •  Underpinning knowledge units (UK) – a more theoretical body of knowledge that covers a particular (sea)food industry topic.
  • Vocational skills unit (VS) – similar to the OS units, but these vocational units apply to the skills taught and displayed in a training environment.
At Seafish we use the UK units when developing a programme.  If a suitable UK unit doesn’t exist then we’ll use one of the other types of units to inform our programme.  As employers have contributed significantly to these units we can be confident that our work represents the reality of working in a seafood business.

How do they work? 

Each unit is made up of learning outcomes and assessment criteria.  The Learning outcome is what the trainee is expected to know or to be able to do after the unit has been delivered.  The assessment criteria is how you would go about checking this.  It’s simple to apply.

Here are the fish and shellfish framework units (both Level 2 and 3) from 2019, just before we all moved over to standards based apprenticeships in England.  

To view the two sets of occupational standards as full lists visit these two pages:

 

Level 2 Fish and Shellfish NOS

 

Level 3 Fish and Shellfish NOS

At the end of each page is a link to a diagnostic spreadsheet that can be used to aid the selection of groups of units to match the activities of a business, department, job role or individual.