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Good News about Third-Party Owned Personnel Schemes

Here is some good news. Recently the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) announced its approval of four Better Buildings Workforce Guidelines (BBWG) schemes under clause 8 of the ISO/IEC 17024[1] accreditation standard, and you may have followed my comments on Twitter as lead on the project for developing these third-party owned personnel schemes.  This marks the first time that ANSI has approved certification schemes for persons developed by an independent scheme owner for use by Certification Bodies (CBs) for persons.  Developed for the energy-efficiency workforce on behalf of the Department of Energy, the schemes—Building Commissioning Professional, Building Energy Auditor, Building Operations Professional and Energy Manager—establish the foundation from which CBs can create their own certification programs, saving them time and resources.  A certification scheme is defined as “competence and other requirements related to specific occupational or skilled categories of persons,”[2] and is frequently presented by CBs as the definition or scope of the certification.

Each scheme contains the following elements:

• Governance structure for the maintenance of the schemes by the scheme owner
• Criteria, qualifications and processes for selecting SMEs to participate in the development activities for the scheme (JTA meetings & scheme committee meetings)
• Job-task analysis & validation study report with detailed content outline & assessment methodology
• Criteria for earning certification
• Criteria for qualifying for the certification examination (prerequisites)
• Recertification requirements & length of certification cycle (interval)
• Code of Ethics
• Supporting documentation to submit with the accreditation application.

Essential to the acceptance of the BBWG schemes by ANSI is the alignment of all scheme requirements with the competency requirements. Respective scheme committees focused on reviewing the detailed list of job duties, tasks and KSAs outcomes from the job-task analysis studies prior to setting other scheme requirements such as prerequisites and recertification activities.  This assured all scheme requirements related to the competencies, which further assures impartiality and fairness for candidates and certified persons.  Similarly the assessment methodologies and intervals for awarding certification were determined based on the competency requirements of the schemes.

As per ISO/IEC 17024, clause 8.6, a certification scheme can be developed by an entity other than the CB, but CBs applying for accreditation using these approved schemes must meet all accreditation requirements, so while a substantial part of the program development (and accreditation application) has been accomplished, additional work is still required of CBs.

One of the benefits of a third-party scheme owner that has multiple CBs developing certifications against the “common” scheme is the outcome of providing greater assurances of comparability and consistency among workers certified to those schemes.   While this is a relatively new approach in the U.S. (CBs tend to be the scheme owners), there may be benefits and efficiencies for scheme collaboration, not to mention the value to workers and employers who may enjoy greater consistency in job-performance outcomes.  Development of the BBWG schemes is a big step forward in this direction.

[1] ISO/IEC 17024 Conformity assessment—General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons.

[2] ISO/IEC 17024 Conformity assessment—General Requirements for bodies operating certification of persons, Section 3, Terms and definition

Categorized in: Regulatory Power