Standards and Skills

(I didn't see any reflection questions posted so I'm just writing some thoughts that I had)

It seems that both fields of Human Performance Technology and Evaluation and attempting to create standards and guidelines. This is nothing new. Similar things have gone on for hundreds of years. For instance during the Middle Ages it was common for a field or occupation to form guilds. These guilds performed a couple of purposes. First, the guild could set the standards or quality of work. In this way if someone purchased a product from a guild member they knew that they were getting a quality product. Which brings us to the second purpose of a guild, price control. Because the guild could control quality they could also control (to some degree) price.

These two articles talked a lot about what a good evaluation should look like and what a good evaluator or human performance technologist should do. They both fields seemed to list similar desired attributes of their practitioners such as good communication and facilitation skills. Although neither article mentions pay as a reason for setting standards I believe that it is one of the driving forces that has propelled this movement for setting standards. When poor work is performed it hurts the field. People loose respect for the field and in turn are not willing to pay as much for their work. These standards also help the clients to differentiate a a quality product to an inferior one. For instance, when people are able to distinguish a good bottle of wine they are willing to pay significantly more money as compared to an lesser quality bottle.

I know that their is no certification process for becoming an evaluator but I wounder if there is to be a Human Performance Technologists. It mentioned that they come from several different fields so I wounder if you just have to have some experience is one of those fields.

I also found these videos about the Fun Theory. I didn't know that Human Performance Technology could be so FUN!