Comparison of BTEC and Skillset Standards

After spending the past few weeks looking at the National Occupational Standards it is clear that the differences between the 'industry professionals' and BTEC's standards are vast.

Before making any sort of comparison I feel it is important to firstly look at who is writing the Skillset standards. The majority of contributors are part of large companies (e.g Sky and Channel 4) and so perhaps their view of the industry and it's needs are somewhat distorted.

This is perhaps most obviously seen in IM11 which doesn't state 'designer' as a job role which would require you to know about copyright laws and intellectual property rights. This is most likely down to the fact that these big companies have huge in house design teams where as smaller companies with much smaller design teams can't afford to have so many different roles. A scenario which me are much more likely to face.

However BTEC are not perfect in their standards either, not by a long way. Due to the large amount of time since it's last update the BTEC syllabus is very outdated and in such a fast moving industry where the only real way to keep 'up to date' on goings on in is by using the Internet, a syllabus last updated 2 years ago (and most likely very minor changes at that) much of it is very, very dated.

The BTEC syllabus is also very long - 198 pages - which could be easily condensed. The reason that the BTEC syllabus is so long in comparison to the Skillset standards is mainly down to the fact that BTEC is purely academic and so means that certain goals and time frames should be set.

This brings up the question as to why Skillset does not include such measures in it's syllabus. This is Skillset's major let down, the fact that although they state what we are expected to know (or at least have an awareness of) they do not say as to what exact level (goals) or when we are expected to have learnt it by (time frames).

If Skillset were to implement these measures, especially some more specific goals, then it would give an even greater advantage to both educators and students than it currently does.

The big thing that needs to be looked at in both syllabuses (or syllabi dependent on your point of view) is the actual content that we 'must' learn. Obviously the Skillset standards are much less compulsory than BTEC's but never the less should be taken into consideration by educational institutes.

When comparing the two, the thing that jumps out at me the most is the technical aspect of the industry. BTEC offer very little in terms of technical units. Even learning something as valuable (and industry standard no matter where you work - almost) as CSS isn't compulsory so I suppose that a distinct lack of PHP, MySQL and databases is nothing to be shocked at.

Skillset on the other hand have a whole unit dedicated to coding scripts to 'provide functionality to interactive media products'.

BTEC of course faces a problem of it's own. Having to maintain an academic element to it's syllabus BTEC has to divide it's units between academic units as well as personal development work. This means that a lot of the units that Skillset recommend are unable to be implemented into the BTEC syllabus due to time been taken up by essays and such.

In an ideal world Skillset and BTEC would get together and come up with some sort of syllabus which took points from both syllabuses (again or syllabi) and made an academic/industry relevant one. But I can't see that day ever happening.

As it is, it is down to us (as students) to look at the skillset syllabus, decide what is relevent, and try and learn some of it ourselves in our own time instead of expecting everything to be given straight to us.