To support further development of the EA pool of evaluators, EA organized in June two training sessions dedicated to potential new evaluators.

The training sessions were organized in Utrecht, hosted by RvA (The Netherlands) from 4 to 6 June and in Lillestrøm, hosted by NA (Norway) from 19 to 21 June.

In order to support the necessary development of the EA pool of evaluators to serve an increasingly busy peer-evaluation program, EA organizes regularly newcomer trainings. With the organization of these 2 trainings sessions, the pool of more than 90 Team Members has been increased with the immediate qualification of 9 new peer-evaluators.

These trainings, co-convened by Paulo Tavares, Chair of the Multilateral Agreement Council (IPAC, Portugal), Ed Wieles (RvA, the Netherlands) and Varpu Rantanen (FINAS, Finland), intend to give the participants the specifics of a peer evaluation and a basic and common level of understanding of the requirements and their application. They aim also to provide the potential team members with insight in the processes supporting the peer evaluation system. The objective is to increase the number of peer evaluators in order to reinforce the EA evaluation resources to serve a busy peer evaluation program. Having sufficient qualified peer evaluators is an obligation for each EA NAB, because EA-MLA and EA-BLA signatories shall provide peer evaluators to the system.

44 persons from 29 EA NAB have been trained during these sessions through discussions in work groups about how an EA evaluator should evaluate the effective implementation of the requirements (review of documents or records, interviews, observation/witness, etc.), looking for evidence and identifying specific risks and causes of non-compliance.

At the end of the sessions, the trainers reviewed performance of the participants and came up with a recommendation about qualification as an EA evaluator, based on:

  • Demonstration by the participants of their understanding and awareness of the evaluation process and the evaluation requirements.
  • Demonstrated ability to work as evaluator (open minded, team worker, communication skills, in particular, communication in English).
  • Demonstration of dedication to the work as evaluator.

The trainers were happy to recommend 9 persons to be qualified as a peer evaluator immediately and for 34 to be qualified as a trainee evaluator. Also the trainers were very pleased to note that a new generation of young high potential accreditation experts will be available soon to participate in the peer-evaluation system.

Welcome to the new EA evaluators!