Recognition is assessment, not paperwork

Done properly it is the most demanding form of assessment there is, because the assessor did not choose the evidence and cannot control the conditions.

Recognition of prior learning has a reputation problem, and the reputation is deserved in a fair number of cases. It is widely perceived as a faster route to a qualification, marketed on speed and convenience, and in some hands it has been exactly that: a document check producing a certificate for somebody who has worked in the field for a while. The damage from that practice falls on everybody, because it makes every legitimately recognised qualification harder to trust.

The confusion at the root of it is treating recognition as an alternative to assessment rather than as a form of it. The requirement being tested is identical to the requirement tested by any other route: can this person do the thing, to the standard, consistently, now. What differs is only where the evidence comes from. In a taught course the assessor designs tasks, controls the conditions and observes the performance. In recognition the evidence already exists, was generated for other purposes, and has to be evaluated as it is.

That makes it harder rather than easier, which is the opposite of how it is usually described. An assessor working from supplied evidence has to determine whether the document actually demonstrates what it appears to, whether the person did the work themselves, whether the standard applied at the time matches the standard now, and whether the performance was consistent rather than a single instance. None of those questions arises in the same form when the assessor set the task.

The second difficulty is that the applicant does not know what will count. Somebody with fifteen years of relevant work has an enormous quantity of potential evidence and no framework for selecting from it, so they either submit everything, which is unmanageable, or submit a resume and a job description, which demonstrates that they held a role rather than what they can do. The quality of a recognition process depends heavily on how well it helps the applicant find and present the right evidence, and that support is the part most often cut for cost reasons.

The third is currency. Evidence of competent performance from eight years ago establishes what the person could do then, and in fields where practice, technology or regulation have moved, that is not the same as what they can do now. This is where recognition processes most commonly fail in either direction: refusing perfectly current practitioners because their documentation is old, or accepting evidence of superseded practice because the paperwork was tidy.

There is also a resourcing reality that shapes everything. Done properly, recognition of a full qualification takes an experienced assessor a substantial number of hours: reviewing evidence, conducting a competency conversation, verifying with third parties, and documenting judgements. Priced as a discount product it cannot be done properly, and the pricing decision therefore determines the quality before any assessor is involved.

The case for doing it well is straightforward. A person who can already do the work should not spend a year being taught it, and requiring them to is a waste of their time and of a training place. That is a real public benefit and it is only available if the recognition is credible, which means the discipline discussed here is not bureaucratic caution but the thing that makes the whole practice worth having.

A final observation about how this practice is positioned commercially, because it shapes everything else. Recognition is almost always marketed to the applicant on speed and price, which are the two attributes least connected to whether the assessment is any good. A provider competing on those terms is competing against operators who will do it badly, and cannot win without doing it badly themselves. Providers who market on the quality of the assessment, and on being credible to employers, are selling something different and are not in that competition at all.