The Training Conundrum

The Training Conundrum – Who Certifies Who ???

Training is an important component of the quality ecosystem in any country. Its importance in upskilling human resources is undeniable.

Training requires both knowledge and skill – mastery of the subject of training, excellence in communication skills to impart knowledge successfully and of course ability to hold the attention of the audience.

Therefore, its important to establish a system for attesting the quality of the trainers or the training courses or training providers.

Is it Certification or Accreditation ?

The first problem arises is in the use of term itself for this exercise – is it certification or is it accreditation or registration?

The academic world prefers to use the term accreditation as it is used in education. Same applies to healthcare field.

However, ISO 17000 defines accreditation as:

“third-party attestation related to a conformity assessment body, conveying formal demonstration of its competence, impartiality and consistent operation in performing specific conformity assessment activities”

It therefore limits use of the term accreditation to competence of inspection or certification bodies or laboratories and the like.

ISO 17000 also defines certification as:

third-party attestation related to an object of conformity assessment, with the exception of accreditation

The object of conformity assessment as per ISO 17000 could be product, process, service, system, installation, project, data, design, material, claim, person, body or organization, or any combination thereof.

As would be obvious from the above, in the ISO world, Certification is the right term to be used for trainings – even for what is called Accreditation in education and healthcare. But that is subject for another debate.

Let us agree on use of term certification for training for the time being.

Who should certify trainings?

The next question is – who should certify trainings?

Certification bodies could be an obvious answer but they can not since they themselves are heavily into training and may need certification for their own trainings. Plus the fundamental principle of third party assessment that you shall not accredit or certify an activity that you yourself are engaged in rules certification bodies out.

What about accreditation bodies – of course most of them also conduct training and are placed in a similar conflict of interest situation as certification bodies. More importantly, their global association, the International Accreditation Forum (IAF), ruled in 2005 that training is not a conformity assessment activity as covered in the definition of accreditation and hence barred accreditation bodies from accrediting trainings.

Oddly, accreditation bodies and certification bodies they accredit are actually in competition in the market when it comes to training. Is that a desirable situation? Especially since we have faced situations where these bodies have been reported to push their trainings with their clients, sometimes even to resolve non conformities.

With these two possible actors out of the way, who else would then certify trainings?

Obviously another kind of certifying body which is free of conflict of interest – and does not undertake training itself.

We therefore have some known names globally – IRCA being the most well known –  Exemplar Global being another.

They are certification bodies no doubt – they also provide what would be considered certification of persons like auditors but have stayed away from getting accredited and relied on their brand name and other strategies to seek acceptance in the market.

They have certified training courses of a number of certification bodies around the world.

What about courses delivered by the accreditation bodies? How would it appear if accreditation bodies were to seek certification from IRCA or Exemplar? Odd, did you say.

Well, at least one accreditation body, NATA in Australia, has actually taken certification for its courses related to ISO 17025 from Exemplar Global!!!

So if certification of training gains acceptance and becomes a market requirement, what would accreditation bodies do – go for certification of their trainings?

And what happens if these certification bodies for trainings face pressure to be accredited or choose to go for accreditation?

Potentially we have a situation where accreditation bodies would go to certification bodies for certification of their trainings and these certification bodies could need accreditation from the accreditation bodies – messy, isn’t it?

To complicate matters further, ISO has published a certifiable international standard  ISO 29993:2017 Learning services outside formal education — Service requirements which applies to training organizations and regular certification bodies are already certifying to it in the market. How they are managing potential conflict of interest with their own role as training organizations would be interesting to know – not many of them seem to be accredited for this standard and this standard is also not in the list of endorsed standards of IAF – hence no guidance should be expected from IAF in the foreseeable future.

 Its time the international community or at least India looks at this issue and comes up with a viable structure for certification of trainings lest we end up with a mess in the market.

Author :

Anil Jauhri
Ex-CEO, NABCB
National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies
Email – jauhrianil@gmail.com
Mobile : +91 9810567765