Successful Accreditation depends on more than experience alone. Candidates need to be able to demonstrate how their work meets the Professional Standards, particularly through complex projects that require professional judgement, technical expertise and autonomous decision-making. This section will help you assess your readiness for Accreditation.
Eligibility requirements
To be eligible to apply for accreditation assessment, candidates must:
- Be a Pathway Member of Icon
- Be a conservation and/or restoration professional (this includes interventive specialists but also those working in Collections Care, Conservation Management, Preventive Conservation, Heritage Science and Conservation Education).
- Have the skill, knowledge and experience to meet all 37 of the assessment criteria at accredited level – candidates typically have around five years of professional experience following training.
Step 1: Reviewing the ACR Assessment Criteria
If you are considering going for accreditation assessment, you should first read the ACR Assessment Criteria to ensure you have sufficient skills, knowledge and experience to meet the professional standards at accredited level. (As a guide, 5 years of conservation experience post-training, usually means candidates have sufficient experience to proceed.)
If there are any areas of the Assessment Criteria you are unsure of, you can discuss these with your mentor. Understanding the standards is key to navigating the process successfully, as you will have to decide where and how your work meets each criteria.
You can find out more about this topic in our video “Am I Ready to Be Accredited”
Step 2: Making sure you have the right projects
The work you present to assessors at Assessment needs to demonstrate that you’re working able to tackle complex conservation projects with autonomy.
When thinking about complexity we’re not thinking about once in a life-time projects, we’re thinking about the types of projects your working on day-to-day. To be suitably complex if it is to meet the assessment criteria. Icon considers complex conservation projects as those which:
- Require choices between options that lead to significantly different outcomes
- Present ethical dilemma and value-conflicts or requires significant value-judgements
- Present substantial technical problems, for instance in relation to unstable or degraded materials or the level of risk associated with treatments or strategies
- Require a deep level of practical understanding to be applied to a situation
- Require the marshalling and management of a wide range of resources.
- (To be considered complex a project must have one or more of these factors present to a high degree.)
- You also need to demonstrate autonomy in your work, and that you have sufficient knowledge to make effective decisions about the projects you undertake, even if final decisions are signed off by senior managers.
You can find out more about complexity and autonomous decision-making in our video ‘Complexity and Autonomy’