Credentialing

The Commission is convinced of the need to balance NAP’s fiduciary duty to clients to ensure that the parliamentarians the organization certifies by granting credentialed status are competent to serve organizations and individuals needing parliamentary services with the reality that an assessment process that is unnecessarily demanding or rigorous could deter members from attempting or prevent them from completing it, with the unfortunate result that there would be too few credentialed parliamentarians available to serve clients.

Accordingly, in formulating the new credentialing process, the Commission has been guided by these principles:

• Assessment should be focused on what parliamentarians, in fact, need to be able to do in practice to serve clients competently rather than on some theoretical ideal of comprehensive knowledge and ability;
• Candidates should be informed in advance, with as much detail as possible, precisely what they will be expected to know and to be able to do and how it will be assessed;
• The assessment process should be summative so that candidates learn and master all the required knowledge and apply that knowledge in a final assessment;
• Registered Parliamentarian candidates will be examined objectively and must complete a two-part assessment demonstrating an overall knowledge of the performance expectations.  Candidates must successfully complete both parts to achieve the Registered Parliamentarian credential; and
• Professional Registered Parliamentarian candidates will be examined objectively and must participate in a meeting simulation that allows candidates to demonstrate overall knowledge of the performance expectations.