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Since being tasked to establish the equivalency of care and support qualifications for pay equity purposes, Careerforce have now received over 5000 queries about care and support qualifications that may or may not be equivalent to the New Zealand Certificate in Health and Wellbeing (Level 2, 3 and 4).

 

Are you wondering how our equivalency assessment process actually works?

Careerforce follows a comprehensive process when assessing the equivalency of existing and expired care and support qualifications.

 

Once we receive the enquiry, we first check to see if the qualification developer is registered in the NZQA database and if that organisation is on the approved NZQA list for that qualification.

 

To be assessed as equivalent, a qualification first needs to be within 15 credits of one of the health and wellbeing qualifications, or above.  We use the information provided by the enquirer to check the qualification level and credit value against the NZQA qualification overview.

 

If the qualification meets all checks at this point we will then map the strategic outcomes of the queried qualification against the strategic outcome of the New Zealand Health and Wellbeing qualifications, using several sources of information: the NZQA strategic purpose statement, qualification document, academic provider website, course/programme outlines, graduate profile statements, details of practicum hours, and others.

 

If the queried qualification’s graduate outcomes match sufficiently to one of the New Zealand Health and Wellbeing qualifications, we will assess it as equivalent to that particular Health and Wellbeing qualification. Our assessment is then peer reviewed, which confirms the judgement made by the assessor and to moderate the way we make decisions and why.

 

Let’s explain how we decide if the outcomes of specific qualifications match the outcomes of the New Zealand Health and Wellbeing qualifications. The process of checking a qualification against the process map means we are analysing as we research each query and forming opinions.

 

Our opinions are formed early on and confirmed by the time the assessment process is complete.  We have evaluated against all the checkpoints highlighted above and captured in our process document, which can be viewed here on our website.

 

Sometimes the judgement is quite clear, or at other times we do need to get to a module level or further information to confirm a judgement.

 

Our qualification equivalencies collectively draw upon our expert research skills, method/attention to detail and rules; knowledge of the NZQA approval processes and our programme development and training background.  Our process is methodical, analytical, evaluative and careful.  Overall, it’s a robust process. Given the number of queries that are coming through – we’ve counted 5,000 to date – this process can take some time, as we may also be required to wait for further information from enquirers and/or organisations.