Current Standards

To achieve its purpose of getting more people, more active, more often, the health and fitness industry needed to become more market oriented. That meant listening to its users and delivering according to their needs, which required a shift from an inward, product focus to an outward, customer focus.

That argument is not a matter of presentation. A qualification written from inside the industry describes what the industry already knows how to teach. One written from the customer's side describes what has to happen for a participant to get a result. They are not the same thing, and the council's position was that only the second can justify an occupation.

For fitness occupations it meant that the jobs should aim at delivering the experiences and results that people need, which is what gives them a real purpose. Job qualifications - the knowledge, skills and competences - should enable the achievement of those job purposes.

The focus for the future should therefore not be on qualifications, but on the outcomes of the work. Education should become more job-purpose or output driven instead of qualification or input driven, and the learner should be central to the process.

What a person should know and be able to do in a particular fitness occupation depends on an understanding of the purpose of that role, and that can only be achieved by delivering certain work outcomes and meeting expectations of performance. In other words, learning outcomes should be determined by the desired work and customer requirements, delivered in a quality controlled way. A job is only performed well if it achieves what it is supposed to achieve.

The council's method followed directly from that argument:

• To define the purpose of the occupation.
• To determine which work outcomes - the output - lead to achieving that purpose.
• To determine which qualifications, in the sense of knowledge, skills, competences and range of application, are necessary to be able to deliver those outcomes.

Any definition of occupational purpose should include the interests of the major stakeholders. In the health and fitness industry those are:

• For the participant: fitness results from safe, effective exercise.
• For the professional: meaningful work and recognition of achievement.
• For the business or facility: more participation, more members, more profit.
• For the industry: more people, more active, more often.

Together these form the desired work outcomes of an occupation, and the qualifications for fitness occupations should be based solely on the achievement of their purpose.

The consequences of taking that position were practical. A programme that produced instructors with a thorough technical knowledge but no effect on whether the people they trained stayed active had not, on this account, produced competent professionals, because the purpose of the occupation is not to hold knowledge but to change what the participant does. Judging a qualification by its output rather than its content also meant that a good programme did not have to look like every other good programme in order to be recognised.

Two sets of standards were published on this basis. The EQF levels 3 and 4 standards for fitness instructors and personal trainers were adopted by the general assembly in Essen on 23 April 2010. They put a greater emphasis on soft skills and workplace competences than on technical knowledge alone, and they were written to make national referencing easier for vocational education and training providers and for higher education. The EQF level 2 standards, covering supervised professional practice and oriented to supporting the developing industry in central European countries, were adopted on 13 April 2011. The groups that drafted both sets are described on the Technical Experts Group page.

Both documents describe the occupation in terms of what the holder must be able to do, and they are written at a level of detail that a training provider or an awarding body can work from when it builds a programme. Neither is a syllabus: they set out the outcomes a programme has to produce, and leave the teaching to the provider that delivers it.

A training provider that wished to be accredited against the standards applied through the accreditation process. The framework those standards sit in, and the projects that produced it, are described in the standards section.