The IFMA Foundation, with support from the International Facility Management Association, has released a new Facility Management Training and Development Framework to address the challenge of insufficient wholistic guidelines for training, particularly in the technical fields. While IFMA’s world-class suite of professional credentials remains focused on core competencies for practicing facility managers, the Facility Management Training and Development Framework provides needed guidance on acquiring or demonstrating mastery of specialized skillsets necessary in the built environment industry.
“FM professionals are increasingly likely to oversee a team of employees, contractors and outsourced labor to fill a matrix of skills necessary to manage a facility portfolio,” said the chair of IFMA’s global board of directors, Graham Tier, CFM, FMP, MRICS. “You need specialists for any number of building systems, and one of the greatest challenges for FM professionals in management is ensuring that the people on their teams have the training and skills needed to fulfill their roles. This exciting new framework is the solution the industry has been waiting for — an easy-to-use catalogue of the training pathways available for an array of mission-critical roles.”
The framework will feature training and professional development options from a syndicate of associations, working together for the first time to provide seamless support of the entire built-environment landscape. As the established leader in the global FM community, IFMA has been driving industry unification for years, supporting global standards and related educational material.
“This is a tremendous opportunity for organizations across the built environment community to share and cross-promote their training resources,” said Tier. “Practicing FM professionals can use the framework to bolster their own skills, train their teams or hire qualified team members. Aspiring FM professionals can identify a career path that gets them the training they need to take the next step. Working together, we’re all going to be better off.”
The IFMA Foundation, through its Global Workforce Initiative and Accredited Degree Programs, has a long history advocating to make FM a career of choice. The new framework makes it easier than ever by charting specific career paths into FM and providing progressive training solutions in the field. As individual professionals progress through the framework, new training achievements will unlock new opportunities.
“This is the future of inter-organizational cooperation,” said IFMA Foundation Chair Nancy Johnson-Sanquist, IFMA Fellow. “The old way of cordoning off your intellectual territory to serve a fixed audience simply doesn’t work anymore. Career paths are too fluid. The Training and Development Framework gives the industry guidance while allowing the flexibility to navigate between training options to suit career and organizational goals.”
Last year, IFMA and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) released a document to help companies develop a more strategic approach to FM and this new Facility Management Training and Development Framework finishes the picture, cataloguing specific roles that fall under the umbrella of FM responsibility and mapping the skills necessary to effectively perform those roles.