Qualifications, courses and providers

Qualifications recorded against the member, with awarding body, date and status, feeding eligibility for grades and for practising status. The point is the feed rather than the record: a qualification that makes somebody eligible to apply for a higher grade should make the system know that, so eligibility is a state you can act on rather than something an assessor checks by hand each time an application arrives.

Courses submitted for recognition, assessed against your criteria, and recorded with the recognition decision, its period and its renewal point. Recognition expires and prompts rather than persisting indefinitely, which is what separates a scheme that is actually run from a list somebody approved once and never revisited. The assessment itself is held with the decision, so the basis for approving a course is still there when it comes up for renewal.

Recognition of the organisations delivering courses, separately from the courses themselves: approved centres, recognised providers, training partners. Each has its own applications, decisions and periods, and its own recognition subscription where recognition is charged for. Keeping provider and course apart is what lets you answer the awkward question of a recognised provider delivering an unassessed course, rather than discovering it when somebody complains.

A course, its instances, and bookings against an instance, with candidates, attendance and results held against the booking. That structure matters because the same course runs many times in many places, and the thing a member booked was one specific instance on one specific date. Reporting on a course and reporting on a sitting are different questions, and both are answerable without anybody joining two spreadsheets.

Exam instances and bookings, candidate records and results, including integration with an exam platform where your assessment runs outside MemEx. The result is what matters here: however the exam was delivered, the outcome lands against the member and feeds their qualification record and their eligibility, rather than sitting in the assessment provider's system waiting to be exported and reconciled.

Integration with a learning management system, so completion recorded there flows back to the member's CPD and qualification record rather than being rekeyed. This is the difference between members recording CPD willingly and not bothering: if the course they took through your own learning platform does not appear automatically, a meaningful number of them will simply never enter it, and your compliance figures quietly understate reality.