Career Development
Becoming an Industry Assessor

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Karen Waterlow, our Specialist Advisor for Facilities Management and Cleaning Industries was asked to write an article for FM World about Becoming an Industry Assessor - click here to view the article.

Need more information? 

Karen has received many responses for further information and her advice follows:

As I mentioned in the article, this is very much a new and emerging area for Facilities Management which will take shape next year and into 2010.
We do expect the new workplace assessed qualifications to be popular with employers and candidates – gaining qualifications through experience will suit the nature of the FM sector and this will be the first time government funding could potentially be available.

There will be three areas where experienced FM professionals could play a role:

• either as an assessor within their organisation,
• working for an awarding body as a verifier or assessor (such as City and Guilds, or ABBE – Awarding Body for the Built Environment)
• or working for a provider (college or training company).

The processes for entry are likely to be different for each aspect.

Working as an Assessor within an organisation

This will be possible for larger organisations and companies.  It may be possible for organisations to self assess i.e. gain agreement from the Sector Skills Council/Awarding Body to assess their qualification internally without internal assessors gaining the A1 (Assessors Award). Therefore, at this stage, we would not suggest anyone in this situation undertake the A1 until their organisation is ready to proceed, either way its possible some assessing to begin the process and undertake the A1 at the same time.

Supporting Awarding Bodies

As much of the FM assessment is focused on management knowledge, set and applied in the FM context, the Awarding Bodies are likely to using existing management resource for external verification. However, they have voiced interest in using external FM expertise which they may access to some extent from the professional bodies (such as the BIFM) but there is interest in increasing the pool of knowledge. Asset Skills will help facilitate this, initially informally.  If you would like to send me your CV, as an attachment to an email kwaterlow@assetskills.org), I am happy to pass this onto the awarding bodies as appropriate.

Providers (Colleges/Training Companies)

This is likely to be the growth area but I do not expect providers to offer the FM qualifications until Sept 09 (this would certainly be true of Colleges – private companies are less fixed to the academic calendar). The process for this will depend on the provider.  Check out College websites and private providers as they start to offer the programmes.  Again, I wouldn't advise anyone to undertake the A1 qualification in advance of securing an appointment. Colleges and providers are likely to fund a candidate through an A1 award and again it is possible to undertake it simultaneously with assessment of candidates. Again, I would be happy to pass a CV onto any providers (email as an attachment to kwaterlow@assetskills.org) who make a direct enquiry with us to locate an assessor. 

Below are some documents which may be helpful:
Click on the title to view/download.

FM Level 3 National Standard – this is the underpinning standard for the NVQ – gives you all the detail on technical areas which need to be assessed.

Assessment Strategy – how this needs to be assessed.

Qualification structure - Level 3 Certificate in FM Practice - the format of the qualification (mandatory/optional units etc).