Observation and professional discussion: what happens and how to prepare

Two of the permitted evidence sources for ILM by City & Guilds Level 3 (8723) and Level 5 (8725) involve your assessor directly: assessment observation and, alongside it, the professional discussion that most centres use to explore your practice. Both make learners nervous, and both are considerably less alarming than they sound — largely because pass/fail against criteria is not the same as sitting an exam.

Assessment observation

Your assessor arranges to watch you doing something real. Not a demonstration, not a role-play — genuine workplace activity, because all evidence for the skills learning outcomes must be generated in the workplace or a realistic working environment, and must be valid and attributable to you.

What gets observed, typically:

• A team meeting or briefing you run
• A one-to-one or coaching conversation (with the other person's consent)
• Chairing a project or planning meeting
• Delivering training you designed
• Presenting a proposal to managers or stakeholders
• You working through a live operational problem with your team

What the assessor is doing. Watching against specific criteria agreed in advance, and writing a record of what they saw — not what they inferred. That record, signed by both of you, becomes the evidence. They are not marking your presentation skills or comparing you to an ideal manager; they are checking whether the criteria were demonstrated.

Practical preparation:

1. Agree the criteria beforehand. You should know exactly which criteria this observation is intended to cover. If your assessor has not said, ask.
2. Pick a real activity that naturally contains them. A meeting you were having anyway beats one invented for the occasion, which will look invented.
3. Tell your team. Explain who the visitor is and why. An unexplained stranger with a clipboard changes how a team behaves — and note that this is the Hawthorne effect in action, which your assessor will also be aware of.
4. Sort the logistics. Room, access, confidentiality, who consents to being present.
5. Do the job normally. The commonest mistake is performing: over-explaining, being unnaturally consultative, or reading from notes. Assessors have seen hundreds of these and are unimpressed by theatre.

If it goes wrong — the meeting is derailed by an incident, someone is absent, the item you planned to handle does not come up — say so. Assessors work in real organisations; they expect it. The recovery is often better evidence than the plan would have been.

Professional discussion

A professional discussion is a planned, structured, recorded conversation in which you talk through your practice. It usually lasts somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes depending on how much it is covering, and it is recorded either as an audio file or as a detailed written record signed by both parties.

It exists because some criteria cannot be observed. You cannot watch someone evaluate their leadership performance or justify a decision — you have to ask them.

What it is used for:

• Exploring the depth behind a document or a reflective account
• Covering criteria about understanding, evaluation and justification
• Testing that the evidence really is yours — a legitimate authenticity check
• Filling small gaps rather than repeating a whole activity

Typical questions. These are the shapes, not a script:

• "Walk me through what happened with the scheduling change."
• "Why did you choose that approach rather than the alternatives?"
• "You mention you used Kotter's model. Which steps did you actually use, and which did you skip?"
• "What did that cost you, in time or in team goodwill?"
• "How did you know it had worked? What were you measuring?"
• "What did you do about the person who disagreed?"
• "What would you do differently next time?"
• "What did you find hardest about it?"

The last three are where the marks are, especially at Level 5, where the criteria expect evaluation rather than description.

How to prepare properly

1. Know your own evidence. Reread it. Being unable to remember the detail of something you submitted is the worst impression you can make.
2. Have two or three real examples per unit you could talk about for five minutes each, with dates, numbers and outcomes.
3. Prepare a failure. Something that did not work, what you learned, what you changed. Learners who claim everything went well are less convincing than those who do not, and this is the single best preparation you can do.
4. Be able to name and critique your models. "I used the GROW model, and it worked for the goal-setting, but I kept slipping into giving advice at the Options stage" is a far stronger answer than a correct definition of GROW.
5. Bring your numbers. Turnover, error rates, completion times, absence, whatever you measured. Specifics are the difference between an assertion and evidence.
6. Do not script it. Rehearsed answers are obvious and they collapse at the first follow-up question.
7. Say "I don't know" when you don't. Followed by what you would do to find out. That is a professional answer, and assessors respect it.

How both are recorded

• The observation record describes what the assessor saw, references the criteria, and is signed and dated by assessor and learner.
• The professional discussion is recorded as audio or as a signed written summary, again mapped to criteria.
• Both go into your portfolio — paper or electronic, whichever your centre uses — and both are subject to internal quality assurance and potentially external quality assurance by the awarding organisation.
• Your centre also completes an attribution statement confirming the evidence is yours.

What if you cannot be observed?

It happens: remote teams, security-restricted sites, shift patterns that do not align with your assessor's availability, or activity that is genuinely confidential. Alternatives:

• Video evidence — up to 15 minutes, recorded when the activity actually happens
• Remote observation of an online meeting, with participants' consent
• A witness testimony from someone who was present
• A reflective account plus professional discussion covering the same criteria

Raise the constraint at induction. Almost every version of this problem has a solution if it is known about early, and almost none of them have a good solution three weeks before your target completion date.

Where to go next

• What is a portfolio of evidence?
• Reflective account examples — the written half of the same story.
• How ILM qualifications are assessed
• ILM Level 3 and ILM Level 5.