[CAUT] Retesting (Diane)

[Israel Stein]

Jeff,

Thank you. You saved me the trouble of writing another long message. I 
have been following a trade association lately that has been offering a 
certification via testing, and who have continuing requirements to 
maintain it  - but they don't teach classes. It is much bigger and has a 
lot more resources - but something could be learned there (including 
from some of their mistakes) They have lists of recommended courses at 
institutions of learning, they contract with outside suppliers to 
develop and provide webinars, they have requirements of specific jobs 
that one has to have completed in that period of time and ways of 
documenting this, and various other ways of documenting one's 
competence. This is an organization of project managers. And many major 
corporate employers won't even look at a resume without this 
certification. And they developed this over the years in a situation 
like ours - unlicensed profession, no formal course of training 
available, lots of all kinds of people calling themselves "project 
managers" and not belonging to the organization.

Look, there are a lot of good ideas floating around, and many of them 
can be incorporated into a comprehensive package - but it would require 
a very new mindset on the part of the PTG and the development of a lot 
of new administrative skills and financing models on the part of its 
administration. And yes, we might lose some members. But we all are 
paying a big price for running our profession on essentially a 19th 
century model - when anybody could call themselves a doctor or an 
engineer, and if you bought a pill from a doctor, you didn't know 
whether it would cure you or kill you, and when you hired someone to 
design a bridge, you didn't know how many trains could pass over it 
before it fell. Well, this is what we tolerate in our trade. And the way 
those other professions (and many others - some very recently) got out 
of that morass is by developing a training system, a body of recognized 
knowledge and a visible symbol (professional certification) that the 
public accepts as an indication of some adequate level of competence. So 
we don't have to reinvent the wheel to follow the same path - we have 
examples we can follow. We need to study them, see what can work for us 
- and then get serious about implementing them.

I have put 20 years of my life into RPT exams, and the only reason I did 
it is because I hoped that some day it could develop into a meaningful 
professional certification. I think that in the past few years we got a 
start on that path. I probably won't live long enough to see any major 
advance along the way if the PTG takes another 20 years for the next 
step, but at least people are thinking about it...

Israel Stein
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:11:35 -0700 (PDT)
> From: tannertuner <tannertuner at bellsouth.net>
> To: caut at ptg.org
> Subject: Re: [CAUT] Retesting (Diane)
> Message-ID: <354353.59632.qm at web180610.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Wim,
> You got it kind of right. These classes are put on by the manufacturers because that's where the money is AND because health?care workers?are required by government to keep a current certification involving continuing education. If the company wants their products sold, they either provide the training or sponsor organizations that do (i.e. pharmaceutical dollars heavily funding?medical schools)?In the end, the consumer/insurance companies are the ones paying for the training because the cost is built into the product.
> ?
> Israel talked about "finding the funding". In our world, this is essentially where it would have to come from as well. It's not going to come from colleges, and as Susan pointed out, it's going to be incredibly difficult to expect technicians to foot the?bill for expensive?continuing education.?Because government does not require piano tuners to hold certifications, unfortunately, piano manufacturers are much more interested in?compensating a sales force?than in investing money to make sure their product is properly maintained by insisting on any kind of company sponsored training for technicians like almost every other industry does. In fact, product service funding comes completely out of the pockets of the sales force.?And that goes for all of them.?This goes back to what I talked about a few months back about manufacturers bearing some responsibility for their own continued reputation.
> ?
> Ideally, some sort of partnership between PTG and the piano manufacturers is what I was trying to suggest a while back, where PTG served the same function as Diane's organization. PTG would have to?be the?instigator and coordinator, and in some cases persuader of manufacturer training.?If there is still a Piano Manufacturer's Association (the one which supposedly published the little blue pamphlet on piano care)?might be a place to start.
> ?
> But what Israel is saying is what I've been trying to say for a long time. PTG certification will never have credibility until it starts acknowledging and incorporating training venues from outside its supervision.? In fact, PTG could be a much more effective organization if it spent more effort working with manufacturers to encourage manufacturer sponsored training, than simply certifying members based on?training materials published by PTG.?The whole industry would benefit.
> ?
> Jeff
>
>