At its AGM on 27 June the British Pest Control Association (BPCA) announced that it was introducing its own CPD scheme in direct competition with BASIS PROMPT. Why?
In the Pest office we were speechless – it doesn’t happen often!! What can have possessed this respected trade association? Surely it was a mirage in the middle of the UK’s summer heat wave. BPCA would never undermine the independent register it had worked so hard to establish?
But, sadly, it’s true, BPCA is introducing its own version of PROMPT and we’ve reprinted the press release at the bottom of this page. The release is a little ambiguous with some talk of consultation underway but as the job of BPCA CPD Scheme Administrator at a salary of £21,000 has already been advertised, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s gone way beyond the ‘let’s see what members think’ stage.
Whilst we would be the first to agree that a bit of competition in a commercial environment never hurt anyone, we really don’t believe that a professional register, set up to demonstrate to government and customers that those on it are true professionals, is about making money. It’s the future of our industry that’s at stake and fragmenting the approach is, to our mind, just about the last thing we need.
Readers may recall that at PestTech 2015 the National Pest Technician’s Association (NPTA) was looking at establishing a CPD scheme with the agricultural training organisation, Lantra. Thankfully the NPTA exec engaged brains and decided to stick with the independent PROMPT scheme. Since then NPTA has given its full support to the BASIS PROMPT register. We hope NPTA holds its nerve and doesn’t now feel pressurised by BPCA to set up its own NPTA CPD scheme.
We’ve got a lot more to say on this. Watch out for the next edition of Pest magazine.
Here’s the BPCA press release:
BPCA to launch in house professional recognition and CPD scheme
Today after its Annual General Meeting (AGM), BPCA announced that it plans to introduce a professional recognition scheme incorporating CPD as a new member benefit from 2019 onwards.
The scheme, ‘BPCA Registered’ will be run by BPCA itself, and will afford member companies and their employees the ability to manage their commitment to ongoing professional development, and attain compliance with membership criteria directly.
Tom Holmes, BPCA President said: “We are extremely enthusiastic about being able to support member companies directly in their ongoing development of employees, further driving professionalism for our industry.”
“The Association is extremely aware of the need to highlight the critical difference between pest management professionals, and ‘professionals’ offering pest management services.”
“The scheme forms an integral part of our strategy to explore, and be ready for, what a licensing structure may represent for the pest management sector in the future.”
“It is important we get this right for all member companies that can benefit from this scheme, so I strongly encourage members take the opportunity to feed their views back to BPCA via the consultation.”
As part of the development of the scheme, BPCA are now inviting all current full and probationary members to feed into its consultation, which aims to understand what features of a CPD scheme are most important to employers and employees, as well as understand how to ensure the optimum user experience.
The Association plans to officially launch the initiative at the time of processing subscriptions for 2019, and members can still opt out of BPCA Registered if they prefer to use an alternative CPD scheme such a BASIS PROMPT, or an internal CPD scheme.