Educational Opportunities Expanding
Joe Gatewood, President, MEA Board of Directors
Now that the holidays are over, our lives completely slow down, right? Wouldn’t that be a dream? We just continue to fill our hours, days and weeks with work, family and hopefully a bit of fun. That is why the Electrical Association continuously strives to be the go-to place for resources that make the business side of my life easier. One of our strategic initiatives included on-demand continuing education so electricians can learn the necessary code changes while fulfilling their CE requirement. The Association’s online-live education has been a popular product over the years and has been approved in many states as a way for electricians to get their CE without traveling to a (sometimes far) destination. We are finally in a place where we can take this one step further and bring the education to you and your electrician’s living room any time at your very own convenience.
In order to meet requirements set through statute with the MN DLI, a third-party accreditation is required for curriculum approval. The Association has been exploring this path and ultimately chose IACET as the accrediting body. In researching options, it was clear that the IACET accreditation for the Association’s Education Department would set us up for continued success and growth as education continues to be a top priority for the Electrical Association.
About Accreditation: The ANSI/IACET Standard for Continuing Education and Training is a universal model for learning process excellence. It defines a proven model for developing effective and valuable continuing education and training (CE/T) programs by measuring a CE/T provider’s training program from procedure to process to result. Because the ANSI/IACET Standard focuses on
how continuing education and training programs are developed, not what they cover, it provides a certifiable framework of researched and proven best practices that can be applied across disciplines and industries. The ANSI/IACET Standard measures all aspects of a CE/T provider’s program development across ten nationally recognized categories. This has allowed for the ANSI/IACET Standard to be recognized as the official standard for CE/T in the world.
The Electrical Association team began the application process in May and spent hundreds of hours completing all of the necessary details for approval. The Association has been providing training to electricians for decades and this approval was all about getting things documented and in processes that are ensuring continued success: How are we auditing the department? How are we looking at resources available? How are we communicating successes to the Board? Are we a reputable organization with the right resources to handle the demand?...and more. The Education team pulled all of the processes and supporting evidence together into a 400-page application that went through 3 rounds of reviews at IACET.
I am happy to share that as of December 17, 2019, the Electrical Association is officially approved as an IACET accredited provider! On December 16, 2019, a reviewer from Washington DC flew out to the Electrical Association headquarters for one last audit of the program. Shortly after, the notice was received that the Electrical Association now holds the status of IACET Accredited provider. We will be working hard in 2020 to develop on-demand courses that meet the other needs the MN Department of Labor sets forth to ensure on-demand continuing education maintains all integrity and learning requirements set forth for electricians training needs. Stay tuned as new offerings are right around the corner!