How to gain a Professional Recognition Award
We often receive enquiries from people who have approached an Awarding Organisation regarding the Professional Recognition Awards, and then are under the impression that they can simply ‘swap’ their existing qualifications that they have gathered through their careers, i.e. in Military Service, Private Sector Industry, etc. for the appropriate Level of Professional Recognition Award.
This is not the case. No candidate can simply ‘swap’ their qualifications for a Professional Recognition Award.
To help you understand what you need to do, we will refer to the guidance give in City & Guilds 9200 Qualification Handbook directly and the 9200 Information Pack produced by City & Guilds, which contains the standards at all levels along with guidance for the Awarding Centre (i.e. The Gill Payne Partnership Ltd is an example of an Awarding Centre) on what Candidates must do and/or demonstrate in order to achieve the qualification.
Any candidate working towards any nationally recognised qualification MUST provide evidence and/or demonstrate their competence and/or, knowledge and understanding against the requirement of the standards being worked towards, until the requirements of those standards are met.
What Evidence is needed?
Evidence can come in many forms and will be assessed by a competent assessor against the standards.
To achieve a Professional Recognition Award a candidate needs to provide evidence of their competency for each standard within the award. There are six standards for each level of the award. To illustrate, the standards for the Level 4 award are:
- Standard 1: Commitment to Professional Standards
- Standard 2: Communication and Information Management
- Standard 3: Leadership
- Standard 4: Professional Development
- Standard 5: Working with Others
- Standard 6: Managing Customer Relationships
For each standard there is a set of standard statements which the candidate is expected to evidence their competency against. Each standard statement has a reference number. To illustrate for the Level 4 award, standard 1 is entitled: Commitment to professional standards. To meet the standard the candidate will be required to provide evidence that they are able to:
- analyse the professional standards which apply in own area of responsibility
- apply professional standards to own working practice
- support others to comply with professional standards etc.
The evidence used to meet the requirements of each standard should ideally be ‘holistic’, i.e. evidence used for one standard is not used in isolation of the other standards. Invariably, evidence generated to support one standard will often support one or more criteria within other standards within the qualification. This means that using evidence holistically is being efficient.
Evidence should also be sufficient, current, authentic and reliable.
Sufficient simply means that there is ‘enough evidence’ to meet the standard not an endless quantity of evidence.
Current means that the evidence shows that the candidate is ‘up-to-date’. i.e. a certificate from another qualification being submitted as evidence of prior learning may not be considered ‘current’ if it is say two or three years old and the candidate has not used that skill for that period, and there is no record of them keeping themselves up-to-date against that standard.
The candidate must be able to perform the task and meet the standard now.
Authentic means that the evidence must have come from the candidate and represent the candidate’s own work; i.e. if the candidate submits a ‘candidate report’ of work which has not be directly observed by the assessor, it should be supported by a ‘witness testimony’ in order to add the ‘authenticity’ to the evidence.
Reliable means that the evidence shows that the candidate will be able to continue to perform to the required standard and that if another assessor looked at the evidence submitted, they would reach the same conclusion as the candidate’s primary assessor.
Examples of Evidence
As mentioned, evidence can come in many forms and from many sources e.g.
- Work Related Projects;
- Reflective Learning Accounts;
- Training Records and Certificates of Attendance/Completion;
- Recognised Prior Learning (RPL)/Qualifications;
- Minutes of Meetings;
- References;
- Witness Testimony;
This is not a finite list and ALL the evidence submitted MUST be examined (assessed) against and meet the requirements of the standards.
Therefore, when candidates come to us having been told that they can just ‘swap’ their RPL/Qualifications for the Professional Recognition Award, they often do not like the answer we give which is that you ‘MAY’ be able to however, the evidence will have to be assessed against the standard and any gaps identified will have to be covered via evidence probably from another source as above.
We are quite happy to provide one-to-one guidance and explanation if you have any questions around this, please use our Contact Form or telephone us to discuss the above.
