Details
AAPNZ Certification – your professional development goal
AAPNZ has an expectation that anyone seeking to employ an administrative person will soon be asking, “Do you have your AAPNZ Certification?” If the candidate does have Certification, this will be acknowledgement of the skills she or he has developed. If they don’t, then we would like the response to be – “This will then become your professional development goal”.
So what is Certification, how does it work, and what will it do for you?
Generally, administrative professionals have been regarded as unqualified, except for a mishmash of mostly informal training and skills gained either in life and/or on the job. This has led to a general under-valuing of the skills required to do the work - and to an under-valuing of the people who perform those tasks.
Administrative professionals today need to be considered as working in a profession and to be acknowledged as working within a recognised career. The only way this can happen is through administrative professionals holding a recognised and required qualification with benchmarked skills.
Certification is a statement of the skills you have and take with you from role to role. It gives value to those skills and recognises that you are a professional at the work you do and can prove it. It is your opportunity to say to the world at large that your skills are valuable, they are recognised and that you meet the benchmark required to do the job you have been employed to do.
Certification is similar in concept to the professional registration that applies to teachers, nurses, doctors, plumbers, accountants, etc: it states that those who have their AAPNZ Certification are benchmarked as being up to the standard required to practice their profession.
This is also your chance to value yourself so that others value you.
So how is Certification structured?
It provides an umbrella over four areas that need to be achieved to show the skills required by the administrative professional. Thus it gives an invaluable benchmark for those in the role, and for employers.
There are four areas of achievement required to gain Certification. They are formal learning, informal learning, work history and service to AAPNZ. Just as a chartered accountant needs to; gain a qualification, undertake a period of practical work experience, and also continue learning, so we developed Certification to recognise the sum total of the administrative professionals’ experience. Not just the formal or in some cases, theoretical or academic learning, but also the applied and practical use of that learning in the workplace.
The Certification process also acknowledges that there are times when you may not be in the paid workforce. This process also recognises the skills you maintain or develop when undertaking voluntary work with an administrative focus e.g. taking a role on a school board of trustees, a role on a sports club or play centre committee, etc. These skills are able to be taken back into the workplace when you return to work. We also acknowledge that not every administrative professional works full time, so the number of hours in your work history required each year is set to ensure that those who do not work full time are not excluded.
How do I achieve Certification?
Under Certification, members will need to achieve a formal qualification which is registered on the Register of Quality Assured Qualifications at Level 5 or above. For example, this could be a Bachelor of Arts completed before starting work or a Diploma in Business, Level 5, achieved part-time over several years.
If you don’t already have formal qualifications you need to research now and get underway, as this can take the longest period of time. A formal qualification can be achieved through distance or part time learning, workplace assessment, or a combination of distance learning and work place assessment. Distance learning through a training provider will help you to gain knowledge you don’t already have. Workplace assessment recognises the skills you currently have. A combination of these two will recognise your current skills and provide an opportunity for you to fill any gaps in knowledge that you may have.
You will need to show 25 hours of informal learning over the previous five years. These comprise the courses that you have attended that are related to your work - computer applications, negotiation, performance management, time management and a huge variety of others including relevant conference attendance. Evidence of attendance, such as a certificate or letter is required. Informal learning is part of building up your tool kit of skills that you take with you from job to job, growing as your experience grows.
A work history is also required, shown through a variety of evidence - job descriptions, letters of proof of employment, confirmation from your employer of the types of tasks you have undertaken. You must have worked, either paid or unpaid, full or part-time for 1200 hours over the previous two years. Voluntary hours may be included for those who may have stopped paid work for a while but have taken on a voluntary role.
Finally, Certification requires you to be a full or affiliate member and to provide service to AAPNZ. You can gain this service through full involvement (100 points) in the running of AAPNZ at either National or local level or through being involved in a series of shorter term project teams which over two years will at least equal full involvement (100 points). This service to AAPNZ can also provide evidence as part of workplace assessment in gaining a formal qualification, and the skills you gain are readily transferable to your workplace.
The value of service to AAPNZ was recently demonstrated where some members were undertaking a level 5 Diploma in Business Administration through workplace assessment. While they all had the bulk of the skills and evidence required they each had a gap. They were able to fill that gap through tasks undertaken within their AAPNZ Group where the evidence was available. The types of roles they had undertaken which assisted were; organising a conference, leading a team (group committee), aspects of running and organising meetings, presenting business information, and being involved in organising an APD event. These tasks were not currently part of their work role so they had no evidence to prove their knowledge. But their skills had been maintained and/or developed through their membership and active involvement in their AAPNZ group. These are skills they can take back to their workplace or to future roles if required and become part of their skills tool kit.
You need to attend 50% of meetings over each of the previous two years. This recognises that many meetings at group level are focussed around professional development and the knowledge gained from working within a professional organisation. These meetings therefore provide you with further skills for your tool kit to take back to your place of work.
Once I have achieved Certification – what then?
To maintain Certification you will need to continue working 1200 hours per year. You need to undertake four hours per year of informal learning, e.g. attending the AAPNZ AGM/Conference and participating in the workshops would meet this requirement for continuing professional development. You must also continue to attend 50% of group meetings each year, to continue gaining further knowledge and skills. These are a very small commitment to maintaining your skills base and continuing to improve your capability.
The AAPNZ Professional Development sub-Committee is continuing to work with employers, recruitment agencies and HR professionals, encouraging them to start looking for Certification as the benchmark they require. I heard the comment from one recruitment agency that “with this type of qualification we wouldn’t need to put administrative professionals through five hours of tests before we took them on.”
They will know, as we know already, that Certification is a valuable process that will give due recognition to all administrative professionals, and a system that employers can have confidence in.
For further information contact your local Group President or Eth Lloyd as noted below.
Eth Lloyd (Assoc, Certificated) AAPNZ
Professional Development sub-Committee
Email eth.lloyd@xtra.co.nz
