ASA Adjudication on Cerco I.T. Training and Recruitment Ltd

Ad

A leaflet for Cerco I.T. Training and Recruitment Ltd offered a training and job search service for positions in IT support. It claimed "When embarking on Fast Track training with Cerco, you can be certain that our Careers and Recruitment team will be ... working to maintain our 98.3% job offer success rate."

Issue

A recipient of the leaflet, who had completed a training course with Cerco, disputed this claim and challenged whether Cerco had evidence to support it.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

Cerco said the leaflet was no longer in circulation but provided a response that they believed substantiated the claim.

They said they had a Careers team who worked with students to ensure they were placed satisfactorily in positions.  They provided data going back to 1997 that showed the numbers of students that completed training courses each year and who were then placed in employment.  They also provided more detailed data for 2003 and the years that followed, showing the positions and organisations in which former students had been placed.  The figures were split to show the number of students who had successfully completed and passed courses; the number of students who, following that, were available for work and needed placing and the number of students successfully placed in positions.  Cerco said the students that currently showed up as "unplaced" were those who had recently completed a course and who they were currently working to place.

Assessment

Upheld

We noted that the investigation took place in the middle of a year and acknowledged that a significant proportion of the current year's students might be unplaced.  We also noted that figures provided by Cerco for previous years extracted significant proportions of students from the total trained and categorised them as "Not requiring placement."  The percentage of students successfully placed in employment was therefore a percentage of the smaller number that required placement rather than the total number of those who had successfully completed the course.

We considered that recipients and prospective students would expect the percentage quoted of those successfully placed in employment to be a percentage of those who had successfully completed a course.  The figures Cerco provided did not demonstrate, however, that 98.3% of students were successfully offered positions after their course, whether the students categorised as "Not requiring placement" were included or not.

The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation) and 7.1 (Truthfulness).

Action

We told Cerco to amend or delete the claim and not to use it unless they had sufficient substantiation to back it up.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)