Building resilience skills – national review of competencies

Skills for Health, part of the Workforce Development Trust, in partnership with the UK Government, has launched a public consultation on the civil contingencies suite of National Occupational Standards (NOS) in support of the UK Government Resilience Framework.

What is resilience?

Resilience is the capability to plan, prepare and respond to adverse events (ie anything out of the ordinary). These could be things such as extreme weather, fire or other emergencies, pandemics, or something smaller like power outages or seasonal trends.

We need resilience to ensure our society has a way to predict and prevent adverse events, and to make sure that they are ready to respond if they do happen.

Why do we need to build capabilities in this area?

Against the backdrop of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic enquiry, and rapid technological advancements, we need to increase the ability of our public and private sectors to anticipate, assess, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from a variety of direct and indirect civil contingency risks.

In light of the ‘whole of society’ approach to strengthening the UK’s resilience to risk, the aim of the civil contingencies NOS review is to build competency and capacity across government, industry and civil society to enable the UK to withstand and quickly recover from a crisis.

Download the civil contingencies factsheet

What are National Occupational Standards?

NOS are agreed definitions of core and transferable skills that are adopted by employers and qualifications bodies across the four nations of the UK to guide and promote skills development. The current set of civil contingencies NOS applies to both the public and private sector and outlines the knowledge and skills that individuals need to perform effectively and safely in any given role.

Download the NOS factsheet

How will the National Occupational Standards be used?

Statements of competence and success profiles will be developed on the basis of the revised NOS to help guide recruitment, performance management, training/skills needs analysis and organisational planning and improvement activities pan-sector. Furthermore, NOS will inform the work of awarding bodies and organisations such as AQA and City & Guilds in the development of future educational and vocational qualifications.

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What’s next?

An expert working group is reviewing the results of the public consultation (which closed on 30 September 2024), with the aim of using insights from across the UK to inform the final standards which will be submitted for approval. We expect that the updated NOS will be available for use in April 2025.

If you’d like to find out when they’re launched, sign up to receive updates from Skills for Health.