Dear InformCanada members,
On March 6th, AIRS/InformCanada announced a two-month suspension of all Recertifications.
This was an automatic assumption and no-one had to ‘opt-in’ to acquire this respite. In recognition of the huge change in the type of stressful situations facing most member agencies, we also announced that we were allowing every week spent in response to the public health crisis as equivalent to one hour of professional development up to a maximum of five hours.
Seldom has there been such a merited definition of “professional development”.
The suspension covered the months of April and May. As we are already mid-May, the AIRS Certification Commission wants to share what will happen on June 1st.
Some of our considerations involved:
* Recertification per se is not overly onerous compared to the time required for studying to take the exam for the first time
* Many organizations are on a June-July financial year and waiting until after June may impact budgets that had taken recertification costs into account
As a consequence:
* The suspension to AIRS/ InformCanada recertification will end as scheduled on May 31st
* Individuals who were scheduled to recertify in either March, April, or May must now recertify by the end of July
* Anyone scheduled to recertify in June also now has until the end of July. Those recertifying in July and onwards will keep to their normal schedule
* Everyone is reminded about the hours of professional development available for participation in COVID response (see first paragraph)
* AIRS/InformCanada recertification dates from the original expiration (i.e. for everyone whose credential expired on March 20th 2020, their recertification – even if accepted in July 2020 –will run until March 20th 2022)
* The major caveat is that if any individual or organization is in a situation that makes recertification problematic within this time frame, please reach out to info@informcanada.ca, and we will accept the explanation and work on an acceptable option
New Certifications
We realize that this is a challenging time to seek AIRS/ InformCanada Certification, but we have had had several inquiries, and want to encourage I&R folks to take up this particular challenge. For this reason, we are reducing, until September 1st, the price of applying for Certification from a base of $95 for InformCanada members to $75.
InformCanada is proud to be associated with the work that you do during these distressing times.
