EHFA and Human Kinetics signed a partnership agreement on 18 April 2011. Human Kinetics publishes technical and academic literature for the fitness, sport and health fields, and the company was already listed among the association's industry partners as a supplier.
The partner scheme ran in tiers, with Vanguard at the top and the Platinum levels, Gold, Silver and Bronze beneath it, and companies joined as operators, suppliers or training providers. Suppliers occupied an awkward position in the association's argument, because they did not employ exercise professionals in the way an operator did. What they did was shape what facilities bought and how they used it: the equipment on the floor, the programmes run on it, and increasingly the systems that recorded what members did. A framework that ignored that side of the sector would have described only part of how a facility works.
Publishing mattered to the standards for a simpler reason. A qualifications framework is a body of documents - the standards themselves, the criteria for accrediting a training programme, the guidance around them - and documents only do their work if they reach the people who teach from them. The association's own reach ran to its membership; a publisher with a list in the same subjects reached training institutions and libraries that the association did not. See industry partners for the scheme and standards for the framework.