European Occupational Standards

EHFA's occupational standards described what a person working in a fitness occupation had to know and be able to do. They were written under the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), the common reference that links national qualification systems together, and its companion credit system for vocational education and training, ECVET. The work was funded by the European Commission and developed in partnership with a number of European stakeholders, and it gave the association a driving role in the harmonisation of standards across Europe, so that the quality of training behind a qualification could be relied on wherever it was delivered.

An occupational standard is neither a syllabus nor a training programme. It is a statement of the competences an occupation requires, written as learning outcomes - what the holder of a qualification knows and is able to do, rather than how long they studied or which institution they studied at. The EQF rests on the recognition that Europe's education systems are so diverse that comparisons based on inputs, such as the length of a course, are impracticable. A standard written in terms of outcomes can be met by more than one route and still be set against its equivalent in another country.

Because a standard describes an occupation rather than a course, it can be met in more than one way: by a training provider's own programme, by a college qualification, or by an employer's in-house scheme, so long as the candidate can demonstrate the outcomes. That is what made the framework usable by a sector whose training was delivered by organisations as different as national awarding bodies and individual gym chains.

The Standards Council described its remit as covering standards for People, Programmes and Places across the exercise and fitness sector: the occupations themselves, the training programmes that led to them, and the settings in which exercise professionals worked. The standards for the occupations were the foundation. The training providers that delivered programmes against them were accredited, and the individual instructors who held them were recorded in EREPS, the European Register of Exercise Professionals.

Standards were not drafted by the secretariat. The Standards Council formed a Technical Experts Group for each piece of work, recruited the experts against published criteria, and left the drafting to them. A completed draft was then distributed across the EHFA membership for the widest consultation, and it had no effect until it was ratified by a specific resolution at the annual general assembly, which usually met in May. That is why the dates attached to the standards are assembly dates: the levels 3 and 4 standards were adopted in Essen on 23 April 2010, and the level 2 standards on 13 April 2011.

The consultation step was not a formality. A draft went to members in every market the association covered, each with its own qualification law and its own training tradition behind it, and the comments that came back were resolved before the text was put to the assembly.

A sector with no shared description of its occupations could not be treated as a profession. Employers had no way to compare what they were buying, governments had no way to say what qualification they expected of the people running the exercise programmes they funded, and an instructor who moved to another country had no way to show what the qualification on the certificate had covered. A standard expressed as learning outcomes, referenced to a European framework and tied to a register entry answered all three at once, which is why the framework was taken up outside the association that wrote it.

The standards were also the sector's answer to a question it kept being asked from outside: what does the certificate behind that instructor actually mean? A framework referenced to a European level gave employers and national authorities one answer, and it gave the training providers that met it something specific to point at.

The argument the standards were built on - that a qualification should be defined by the purpose of the occupation and the outcomes of the work rather than by the qualification itself - is set out on the current standards page. How the framework was arrived at is on the history and background page, and the two EQF levels the standards were written at are explained on the levels 3 and 4 page.