It has been an exciting three
days for Services SETA as the Planning (Personal Care Chamber), and Core
Business (Qualifications Development) Units met the image consulting industry
stakeholders to start the profiling of the new occupational qualification for
Image Consulting. The interactive webinar took place from Monday, 13 to
Wednesday, 15 July 2020. The journey started over two years ago following the
industry's request to the Services SETA to consider registering the image
consulting qualification on the National Qualifications Framework. There was no
occupation on the Organising Framework for Occupations (OFO) that could align
with Image Consulting. While there are companies and individuals already
offering image consulting services, there is currently no registered standard
educational qualification for image consultants.
Standards and registration of
qualifications add so much value to a course of learning as it makes the
qualifications to be recognized nationally and internationally by educational
institutions and employers.
OFO is a coded occupational
classi?cation system used by the Department of Higher Education, Science, and
Technology (DHST) and SETAs to achieve consistency in identifying, reporting
and monitoring skills demand and supply in the South African labor market.
During the qualification development process, stakeholders use the OFO code
guidelines to identify and group jobs and tasks to create an occupation.
In June 2019, DHST approved
the listing of an Image Consultant as an occupation. Following the approval,
the Services SETA Accounting Authority (Board) approved the development of the
occupational qualification as one of the organizational performance targets for
the 2020/21 financial year.
The process leading to the
development of an occupational qualification begins with the Core Business
Department appointing a qualified Qualifications Development Facilitator (QDF)
to lead the process, obtaining information from a group of industry experts,
compiling and structuring data in an acceptable format for approval by the
Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO).
The process for the
development of the Image Consultant Occupational qualification started with the
scoping session on 13 July 2020 attended by about 40 industry experts called
the Community of Experts Practitioners (CEPs).
The outcomes of the session
included:
On 14- 15 July, the session,
which comprised of the Image Consulting CEP focused on the profiling of the
occupation. To take the process forward, a minimum of 12 industry experts will
now work with the QFD and report back to the CEP after each stage of the
occupational qualification development process.
Services SETA Chief Executive Officer, Amanda Buzo-Gqoboka says that she
expects the process to conclude by the end of the year. "Facilitating the
development of qualification is part of fulfilling our mandate. We are grateful
to the industry experts for making their valuable time to be fully involved in
this process.