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The Certificate of Excellence Program is designed to encourage FSIS and State inspection personnel, as well as any other interested Federal or public sector employee to take advantage of available educational and training activities and make self-development a lifelong activity. The Program attempts to structure all types of job-related learning, formal and informal, into a format that will make it easier to reach both professional and personal goals. By certifying their continuing participation in educational opportunities and their advancing levels of study in specialized study areas, the Program hopes to help employees not only become progressively more proficient technically in a chosen field but also simultaneously develop skills that make them well-rounded individuals better able to succeed both on and off the job, no matter what their undertaking. The Program will attempt to
increase your awareness of training opportunities that best complement
your stage of development and stated areas of interest. This
can save time unnecessarily devoted to training that is not particularly
helpful to your career advancement nor personal growth—training,
for example, that is better suited to another area of expertise
or is better delayed until later in your career. The Program as it applies to FSIS employees covers broad sectors within the Agency in which you may wish to develop: red meat inspection, poultry inspection, processing inspection, egg products inspection, compliance, computer science, supervision and management, and administrative support. These areas have been chosen to be flexible enough to accommodate both the knowledge and skills needed for today’s inspection and those that will be needed as inspection rapidly evolves. You may also develop your own unique specialty area with CEDL approval. Within each of these broad
areas there may be specialties in which you may wish to concentrate,
particularly if you are at an intermediate or advanced level
of knowledge in your specialty area. As an example, a veterinarian
or food technologist with a background in Red Meat Inspection
might wish to specialize in Parasitology or Public Health; a
supervisor might wish to specialize in Public Administration
or Labor-Management Relations. To obtain a certificate at any level, candidates must accumulate through any combination of academic credit hours, CEUs, or contact hours of alternative training: —20 credits in their specialty area —20 credits in complementary studies, which will vary with the specialty area selected. These will be described later in this section and more definitively in Appendix B at the back of this catalog. Training and educational opportunities will be evaluated as to their difficulty on the following basis: Basic. Freshman and sophomore college courses; most FSIS field training; any material borrowed from the CEDL audiovisual lending library, with few exceptions; the following distance learning courses offered through CEDL (DL0107, DL0110, DL0121, DL0131, DL0210, DL0230, DL0261, DL0300, DL0305, DL0307, DL0313, DL0316, DL0525, DL2200, DL2600, DL3200, DL3600, DL3700, DL4100); the following courses offered through the Training Center and in field locations (TC100, TC105, TC150, TC161, TC210, TC305C, TC305S, TC305X, TC400S, TC410S, TC500, TC501, TC520, TC521S, TC530, TC602, TC703C, TC703X, TC705P, TC904D, TC904XM, TC904XP, TC1505, TC1505A); and most software and personal growth classes offered by training organizations. Intermediate. Junior and senior level college courses; the following distance learning courses offered through CEDL (DL0250, DL0280, DL0310, DL0317); and the following courses offered through the Training Center and in field locations (TC162, TC308, TC489, TC520, TC530, TC708, TC801, TC904H, Correlation Meetings) Advanced. Graduate level college courses and the 689 and 904U courses offered at the Training Center. Other education and training opportunities will be evaluated by the Continuing Education and Distance Learning Center based upon information you and the provider supply. Levels of difficulty will not be rigorously applied since such hard and fast dividing lines don’t exist in reality. Higher-level courses can always be used to fulfill any lower-level requirements. Lower-level courses can be used to help fulfill up to half the requirements of the next higher level (i.e., basic-level courses can help fulfill intermediate-level requirements and intermediate-level courses can help fulfill advanced-level requirements). While the difficulty level
of the specialty area study will increase with each level, that
is not necessarily the case with the complementary studies, which
can vary in breadth rather than depth. Academic credits are earned by successfully completing courses offered by an accredited college or university. (NOTE: It is only this type of credit that is currently recognized as acceptable for qualifying for certain job series such as the food technologist series.) Continuing Education Units are earned by successfully completing either 1) Agency training that has been recognized by the Human Resource Development Staff as creditable—this includes virtually all training offered since October 1995 at the Training Center or through the Distance Learning Program’s self-study courses or 2) by successfully completing training from an organization outside the Agency that awards CEUs. There are other types of training that earn neither academic credits nor CEUs that may be applicable to this program—for example, a computer class from your local computer retailer, an audiovisual presentation borrowed from the FSIS AV Lending Library, a one-day seminar sponsored by an area university or a national training organization. Such training can be evaluated for credit in terms of contact hours by the HRDS Continuing Education and Distance Learning Center. A rough guide to credit equivalency
is as follows: 1 CEU is equivalent to 10 contact hours of study
or training and is equal to 1 credit in this program. College
or university academic credits are multiplied by 1.5 as they
are generally understated in terms of contact hours. Any training
not already evaluated in terms of academic credit or CEUs will
be evaluated by the Continuing Education and Distance Learning
Center in terms of contact hours, with 10 contact hours the equivalent
of one credit. The goal of this program is to encourage ongoing activity. That is why all certificates of excellence are awarded only for a period of four years. At the end of that time period, the employee must either have advanced to the next level and have earned a new four-year certificate or demonstrate a maintenance level of continuing education at the current level in order to renew the certificate for a one-year period. Certificates may be maintained at any level indefinitely by completing the minimum maintenance level study activity. The maintenance level for any certificate is the completion during the preceding 12-month period of 3 credits in the specialty area at the same level of difficulty and 3 credits in one or more complementary study areas. The maintenance level is obviously the only program available for employees with advanced level certificates, and they must achieve this maintenance level yearly after the initial four-year award period. As the life of the certificate is only four years, so too there is an automatic cutoff for training activities to be applied toward certificates. Thus any work toward a certificate that is more than four years old will not be creditable toward that certificate. This is not to devalue previous training—it remains fully creditable for other purposes—but this program was not created to recognize an accumulation of training: its purpose is to encourage its ongoing nature. An additional reason for stressing the importance of continuing one’s education is that in these rapidly changing times the store of knowledge of almost any field of study will have increased or been revised significantly, even radically, in only a few years. For the purposes of beginning this program, the earliest completion date for training that will be accepted is October 1, 1995, since it is only since that date that HRDS has been certified to award Continuing Education Units. Employees who do not advance
or maintain their certificates must requalify at the last level
achieved if they wish to It is expected that many employees will change their specialty areas and even their general areas of interest as their career matures. For example, one might move from Poultry Inspection to Compliance. If you wish to maintain a
certificate of excellence from your former specialty, only the
maintenance-level 3 credits in the old specialty area need be
completed each year. The complementary study credits required
for the new specialty certificate will also suffice to maintain
the old certificate. Education and Training Sources The program will be making a concerted effort to locate and make you aware of training opportunities available locally and through distance learning from other Federal agencies, academia, industry, and commercial vendors. It will also publish specific enrollment requirements, a description of available programs, tuition expenses, and contact points for outside training and education across the country in order to provide you with a wide range of sources to fit your individual needs. This information will be published
as it becomes available in Section Seven of this catalog.
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