Chartered Institute of Housing

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) approached Eidos Consulting to support them with creating collateral for member and non-member self-assessments against their new professional standards, recognising our expertise in defining skills and behaviour needs. Eidos Consulting worked in partnership with the CIH to produce a substantial question bank, as well as a host of individualised outcome statements that the user would be provided with based on the results of their assessment.

Here is what the Director of Professional Development at the CIH had to say about our work with them:

“We had already created a professional standards framework based around 7 behavioural characteristics (in hindsight, I wish we had brought Eidos in to support the development of the framework!). The framework was really just the shop window for the standards – we wanted to provide a process for professionals to benchmark against the characteristics. Eidos came highly recommended as experts in professional standards and organisational development. The work involved creating a bank of around 300 questions and to develop tailored narrative against each of the potential outcomes in relation to how the questions were asked – not an easy ask. Paul understood the brief immediately and offered his own valuable insight that we hadn’t even considered at CIH.

“One of the key things we were looking to create was a standards framework and a self-assessment that would be accessible to all professionals working across the housing sector – which is very broad and diverse. So, it was important that Eidos understood the sector, the roles and the challenges they faced. I was really impressed at how quickly Eidos understood the sector, but also their understanding of what CIH needed to move this work forward in a speedy way.

“As a professional body, it was essential that we engaged with our members and other stakeholders to ensure that what we created spoke to their lived experience as housing professionals. It also helped get sector buy-in as people we engaged with all became keen to be involved and to test and pilot the self-assessment. Initially, alongside Eidos, we held a virtual focus group with some of our engaged professional champions to provide them a brief of the project. Eidos then developed a template and virtual platform for the professional champions to set out some scenarios and examples of practice against the 7 characteristics. Eidos then translated the scenarios into a bank of questions. The focus group were then engaged again to test the questions and provide additional feedback. This approach worked well as it didn’t demand a huge amount of time from busy housing professionals, while still enabling us to set the questions in a practical housing context.

Overall, Eidos were great to work with. They have great expertise, are very professional and always available on the end of the phone. More than just delivering the project on time and on budget, I feel they delivered over and above their brief and I would highly recommend them if you are looking to undertake the development of a competency/ standards framework. But, get them involved from the beginning – it will make the development much more efficient and effective!”

Sarah – Director of Professional Development, Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH)