Brenda Aynsley, Chair of IFIP IP3 (International Professional Practice Partnership), discusses IP3’s major achievements, including its professional accreditation scheme across member countries.
What have been IP3’s major achievements to date and where is it heading?
Our major achievements have been to design, and get accepted by the IFIP community, the accreditation scheme that we currently have, which provides mutual recognition for professionals in one country who move to another country that has also got an accredited scheme.
For example, ACS has a Certified Professional and Certified Technologist level scheme. Both of those have been accredited by IP3 and so the other countries that are part of that scheme who have also got certification schemes, their professionals can come to Australia, seek to have that recognized, and therefore, qualify in the same way as an Australian practitioner would and the reverse is also true. And in fact we have had an ACS member go across to Canada and be accredited through this scheme so they didn’t have to jump through any other hoops in order to be recognized as a professional practitioner in that country.
In a global and developing industry like ICT where standards are international, doesn’t the mobility of professionals have major implications for progressive organisations?
It does and it should and as more companies recognize the value of professionalism in a risk management strategy sense, I think it will become more popular and so our major achievement is that accreditation scheme and the fact that we’ve built the global partnership from zero members to five members to 15 members today. Small numbers at this point in time but it’s early days. We’re a very young profession, we’re 50, 60 years old and it takes time to deliver on that.
More IFIP Interviews can be viewed at the IFIP YouTube channel
