I’ve spent a chunk of this week reading National Occupational Standards, which is not a sentence I expected to type.
It started because I wanted to check how our own loggist training holds up against the Resilience and Emergencies NOS — the official competency framework for this sector. Sensible enough. Then I noticed that the UK Resilience Academy’s own loggist courses list themselves as aligned to the same standards, plus the National Resilience Standards for Local Resilience Forums. Fair enough, I thought — but what does “aligned” actually mean here? What’s in these standards that a course could be aligned to?
So I read them properly, rather than skimmed. And it turns out we’d already found the answer to this, years ago, without meaning to.
We wrote this exact sentence into our own course
When we built our Loggist Training course, the introduction module walks learners through what the established standards say about logging — ISO 22313, ISO 22361, the lot. It quotes them directly: ISO 22313 says an organisation “should develop procedures that ensure recording of vital information about the incident, actions taken and decisions made.” ISO 22361 defines the log-keeper as someone who “maintains a log of all decisions and actions for later reference and use with reviews and reports, insurance or liability issues, enquiries or investigations.”
And then the script says, in plain terms: “However, these standards actually give very little practical guidance.” They establish that logging matters and that someone should do it. They don’t tell you what to write down, what to leave out, or how to keep up when three people are talking over each other.
Turns out the same is true of the NOS and the National Resilience Standards, which sit in a different family of documents entirely but land in exactly the same place. The standard most directly on point, SFJCCAG1, “Respond to emergencies,” asks a responder to “record decisions, actions, and context in an auditable manner.” One line. And Standard 12 of the National Resilience Standards for LRFs — the one about Strategic Coordinating Group preparation — asks for “clearly defined and robust arrangements for recording and logging discussions and decision making.” Also one line.
None of that is a criticism of the standards, by the way. They’re not written to be how-to guides — they’re outcome statements, deliberately broad enough to apply whether you’re a district council, a hospital trust, or a police force. A standard that told you precisely how to log would stop being a national standard and become one organisation’s SOP with a government logo stuck on it.
So what is a course actually promising when it says “aligned”?
To be fair to UK Resilience Academy here — their own course pages are more careful than I expected. They don’t claim the course delivers full competence against the NOS. The wording is that it provides “introductory or contextual knowledge” in relation to the subsidiary standard, and a “sound working-level proficiency” against the primary one, closing with: “Full competence is achieved and maintained through continued learning, practice, and experience in role.”
Compare that with how the same course turns up on LinkedIn: a September course-promo graphic with a big rubber-stamp badge reading “Aligned to National Occupational Standards.” No subsidiary or primary, no introductory-versus-working-level distinction, none of the sentence about full competence coming from practice. Just the stamp. That’s not a false claim either — but it’s a good demonstration of exactly the gap I’m talking about. The caveat that matters most is the one that survives the fewest words, and it’s usually the first thing to go when a course description turns into a marketing graphic.
Which is, if you think about it, the same conclusion I’ve just walked through. Alignment tells you a course covers the right topic area, mapped against the right reference points. It cannot tell you the standard has supplied the practical detail, because — as both our course and, to their credit, UKRA’s own course-page small print concede — it hasn’t. That detail has to come from somewhere else: from people who’ve actually sat in the room during a real incident and watched a log get picked apart afterwards.
If you want to see this for yourself before booking any course that leans on the word “aligned,” the standards are free and public — the WDTrust NOS listing and the gov.uk National Resilience Standards PDF will take you twenty minutes, and you’ll come away a much sharper judge of what any given course is actually offering.
What actually fills the gap
Our course doesn’t try to pretend the standards will do this work for you. It’s built around the things that go wrong in practice: loggists who get roped into making the tea and running errands because nobody’s told the room what the role actually is. Logs that turn into a verbatim transcript instead of a record of decisions, actions and the reasoning behind them. Entries with no timestamp, or written up after the fact rather than contemporaneously — which matters more than people think, because a log can be a discoverable document, and “recorded three days later from memory” is not a good place to be sitting in a public inquiry.
We cover the boring-but-vital mechanics too — what a log sheet actually needs (who’s in the room, who’s dialling in, the decision, the basis for it, the anticipated outcome, and confirmation it’s been done), why loggists need a proper break every hour because it’s a genuinely exhausting job to do well, and why paper, electronic and audio logging each have their own failure modes. (Yes, we get asked about AI transcription a lot at the moment too — it’s a fair question, but in our experience it still struggles to tell voices apart in a busy room and can’t ask for clarification when a decision is ambiguous, which a human loggist can. Watch this space, but for now, stick with what works.)
None of that comes from a standards document. It comes from having actually done the job, and from the log sheets our learners send back to us for feedback at the end of the course — which, incidentally, we’d love yours to join.
Take a look at the Loggist Training course if you want the practical version rather than just the aligned one.
Related posts:
The Loggist: one of the most important roles nobody trains for
ISO Spaghetti: Making Sense of the Standards You Keep Hearing About
What England’s World Cup night can teach you about crisis management (even if, like me, you couldn’t care less about football)
What Every Public Inquiry Is Really Telling Us About Logging