EREPS: the European Register of Exercise Professionals

EREPS, the European Register of Exercise Professionals, was the register through which an exercise professional's qualification could be recognised by employers and by the public across Europe. It was the association's answer to a practical problem: a certificate issued in one country told an employer in another very little on its own.

Training and qualification in the fitness sector grew up nationally. Each country had its own awarding bodies, its own levels and its own terminology, and the certificates that resulted made sense inside that system while remaining opaque outside it. An instructor who wanted to work in another member state, an employer recruiting across borders, or a public authority commissioning exercise programmes had no straightforward way to establish what a given qualification represented. A European register gave them one place to look.

An entry on EREPS recorded an individual practitioner whose qualification had been assessed against EHFA's European occupational standards - the document set describing the knowledge, skills and competences expected of the sector's occupations. Those standards were referenced to the European Qualifications Framework, which allowed a qualification to be placed against the national systems rather than replacing them. The register therefore sat on top of the standards: it created no qualification of its own but recorded the ones that matched, and the technical authority behind that judgement rested with the association's Standards Council.

The register was public in intent as well as in name. The reason for recording a practitioner was that someone outside the profession - a member of the public choosing a trainer, or an employer checking an applicant - could establish that the person held a recognised qualification. Registration was a claim that could be verified, not a certificate that had to be taken on trust.

EREPS was built to work with national registers rather than around them. Where a country already kept its own register of exercise or sports professionals, the association's approach was to link the two, so that people already registered nationally gained European recognition without a second, parallel system being created. The association's news archive records several arrangements of that kind: a strategic alliance with the Catalan sports professionals register in June 2011, a memorandum of cooperation with the Government of Catalunya that September, and the recognition of a new national register in Ireland, which joined the EREPS programme the same month.

A register is only as strong as the qualifications it admits. The route in ran through training programmes that had themselves been assessed: a provider whose course delivered the occupational standards could apply for accreditation, and the association maintained a published process, criteria and evidence requirements for doing so. For the individual professional the chain - accredited training, an assessed qualification, a register entry - was what made the recognition portable. The level 3 and level 4 standards describe the qualifications the register was built around.

EREPS was also the clearest expression of why the association existed. Standards, accreditation and the register were three parts of one argument: that an exercise professional should be able to demonstrate what they know and can do, and that the demonstration should mean the same thing wherever in Europe it was read.