Certificate IV in Business Procurement RPL
If you have experience as a project manager, project coordinator or team member you may be able to fast track the Certificate IV in Business Procurement.
This is through a process called Recognition of Prior Learning or RPL.
What is RPL?
Qualifications such as the Certificate IV in Business Procurement Practice (????) are created based on the skills and knowledge required to work effectively in project support roles or manage small projects.
Therefore RPL considers that your past experience might actually meet these requirements. What this means is that rather than completing the standard course, learning and the required assessments you will use you past experience to show that you can meet the requirements.
At the end of the day the end point is still the same; you will be required to show that you can meet all the requirements of the Certificate IV in Business Procurement Practice.
How can I RPL the Certificate IV in Business Procurement?
To attain the Certificate IV in Business Procurement through RPL is pretty simple. That is if you’ve got the experience to back it up.
On that note if you have never worked in a project or supported a project manager RPL would not be a good option and if you’re after the Cert IV level qualification your best options are to enrol into a workshop or complete online.
For those with experience, it’s a 3 step process.
What is the RPL process?
The first step is to make sure the Certificate IV in Business Procurement Practice is the right qualification for you and that you are suitable to RPL. This is a quick process and involves knowing you and your relevant experience. We normally look at things like a resume or a summary of your experience. From there we provide advice on your suitability or put you in touch with one of the consultants to discuss your individual situation.
Here we work with you in showing that your experience and knowledge are sufficient in meeting the requirements of the Certificate IV. There is a range of evidence we can look at and this has been included in the section below.
Scope is pretty flexible here and there is no ‘one set’ of documents you need to show.
We also support you through this process, for some people it’s super quick, often a matter of sending their project files.
Making a decision isn’t a scary prospect, in many cases we are working with you in getting together the evidence so you know where you stand along the way.
Once we have the evidence collected we formally assess it against the course requirements to make sure we’ve covered everything.
If yes, congratulations, you are issued the Qualification.
If there are areas missing or gaps, we can ask you questions through an interview or email or give you more time to gather the evidence.
What evidence do I need to RPL the Certificate IV in Business Procurement
Whilst the end point will be the same for everyone, the types of evidence you submit may be different based on your background and situation. The following are a guide as to some of the things which will help you in being able to use skill recognition or RPL to complete the Certificate IV in Business Procurement.
The evidence requirements will also change depend on the units you’ve chosen. For the purpose of this guide we have based it upon the standard units offered by Scope Training in the Certificate IV Leadership & Management Practice courses.
Here we are looking for your ability to provide input into the development of a project.
Documents such as Project Charter, Project Brief, Scope of Works, Request for Quote or whatever your project used to get it started.
Evidence here can also include meeting minutes from project start up meetings.
This is probably the big one, however in some cases it is as easy as submitting your project plan.
Things we look for here include your project’s;
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Schedule, Budget, Quality, test or audit plans, project resourcing such as a RACI matrix, communications plan, stakeholder analysis, risk register.
Here we are looking for evidence that you can monitor, track, respond to change and report on project status.
The key documents include:
Your schedule and budget showing how it’s been updated to reflect the planned versus actual, change requests or variations which have been approved, status reports or meeting minutes.
Here we are assessing whether you can close a project inline with industry standards. The evidence we look for includes how you’ve closed out each of the knowledge areas (scope, time, cost etc.) and in most cases simply includes:
Close out reports, Lessons Learned.