Increasingly more employers and professionals put value on continuous learning and further education. This lets the professionals constantly update their knowledge in terms of emerging trends and gives the companies a competitive edge in terms of highly qualified and educated employees.
Demand generates the supply, which is why there are currently multiple professional certifications in almost every existing field. This also leads to the increase of the organizations operating as certification and examination centers.
These trends raise some questions. Are all the certification and examination centers the same? Do all these centers maintain proper conditions and provide high quality services? Are all the exam centers objective and fair towards all their customers?
Swiss Global Cert attempts to answer these questions with the universal standard SGC-26268-2018. This standard is developed specifically for organizations that conduct examination or grant certifications and concerns not only processes, but also required documents and compliance of these organizations with specific international standards.
Why SGC-26268-2018?
The SGC standard contains general requirements for the organizations that provide and/or conduct examinations or certifications as part of their core business or their additional services. The requirements represent a set of rules regarding organizing and conducting the exams, including the actions preceding and following the exams; resources requirements; personnel, clients and partners; documentation and other factors relevant in this context.
The standard combines instructions concerning preparing and conducting exams and certifications, as well as provisions on quality assurance and data protection.
The aim of this standard is to set a universal benchmark for the organizations operating as certification or examination centers. This is to ensure that these organizations provide high quality uniform services and are objective and impartial.
By obtaining the Swiss Global Cert certification, you confirm the professionalism and quality orientation of your organization!
Structure of the standard
The standard contains 6 chapters, each of which covers a specific organizational or operational aspect of a certification or examination center.
The first chapter contains general requirements towards certification and examination centers.
Next part describes in details the requirements to the processes, namely the examination process as well as supporting processes that precede or follow the examination and are vital for organizing exams and other operations of exam centers.
The chapter Management of Nonconformities concerns the most important issues of the examination and certification processes, such as confidentiality, impartiality and objectivity. This chapter contains recommendations and requirements as to how to avoid fraudulent practices of both, the exam center employees and the exam participants.
The main documentation requirements are described in the next section, which contains not only the necessary documents, but also provisions regarding creating and updating the documents etc.
Further, main resource requirements of the examination or certification center are described. These are divided into 3 categories : personnel, infrastructure and other necessary resources.
The final chapter regards essential quality assurance activities and processes of examination and certification centers. These encompass process quality, data protection requirements as well as measures that have to be taken to ensure quality control of the internal and external parties of these organizations. A checklist in the end of the standard contains main points from each chapter and has to be submitted during the application process. The exam centers can use the checklist to make sure they are compliant with the standard. The standard also contains a list of documents that the exam center needs to submit upon application.