Project Products

The EA-Fitness project listed the products it would deliver. Taken together they describe a project that was as much about translation, education and research as about the standards themselves.

• Successful accreditation of partners and additional training providers against the EHFA Standards
• EHFA accreditation documents translated into the partner languages
• Revised EHFA Standards
• New EHFA Standards
• Establishment of EREPS in the partner countries
• Results of the research work package
• The project website

Two of the products were the standards themselves, revised and new. That was the part of the work that could only be done by applying them: a framework is tested when a provider tries to have a real curriculum recognised against it and finds that a competence is described in a way that cannot be assessed. The revisions that came back from the partner countries fed into the framework the association maintained afterwards, and the history of the standards records how it changed, and the standards themselves are listed on the current standards page.

The accreditation product was the one the project was named for: partners, and additional training providers beyond the partnership, successfully accredited against the EHFA standards. Alongside it, the accreditation documents were translated into the partner languages, without which a provider in Portugal, Lithuania or Hungary would have been applying to a process written in someone else's language - a barrier that has nothing to do with the quality of what is taught. The accreditation process and its documentation are described in this site's standards section.

The counterpart of accreditation was the establishment of EREPS in the partner countries. Accreditation endorses what a provider teaches; the register records the individual instructor who has come through it, in a form an employer in another country can check.

The research work package was to report on the labour and training markets for fitness in the partner countries. Its public face was the 2010 employer survey, which collected information and feedback from fitness employers in order to establish the trends and perspectives for employment in selected EU countries, and which the project published in eight languages for a questionnaire of about ten minutes. EHFA announced it in July 2010; the survey responses were intended to inform training decisions at European level.

The last product on the list is the reason this section can be written. The project published its own pages - description, objectives, background, partners, events, products and contacts - and those pages are the archive this record is rebuilt from. They are also a fair illustration of the seventh product's purpose: a project funded to change how a sector trains its workforce has to say what it is doing while it is doing it, not only when it has finished.

The project page sets out the objectives these products were meant to serve, and the partners page lists the organisations the work was divided between.