So, you’ve enrolled in a new course to help take your career to the next level, and you find you already have a large portion of the skills and knowledge being taught from your previous work experience or qualifications. You can either waste more time and money repeating those modules, or you can apply for a Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) assessment to gain credit for existing skills and experience and fast track your new qualification. But how hard is it to achieve and is it worth the effort?

Preparing your RPL Assessment

The short answer to that is it really depends on how well documented your skills are and how closely they align with the qualification requirements. An RPL assessment requires you to gather and provide strong evidence of your skills through a variety of documents such as work samples, certificates, references, testimonials, work diaries and detailed job descriptions. If you have clear and detailed documentation that you can present to your assessor about your work experience, your new qualification will be much easier to fast-track. However, if your experiences are less directly applicable you may find it difficult to gather sufficient evidence to gain credits successfully.

Whilst it may seem like a daunting process to begin with, if there is a chance that you can shave a significant amount off the time it will take you to complete the course, not to mention the cost, it’s totally worth investing the effort into the process!

How can your Training Provider and RPL Assessor help?

The good news is you don’t have to go it alone. Both your chosen training provider and your RPL assessor will be there to fully support and guide you through the process, helping you to understand what types of evidence you will need to support your application, how to clearly identify and articulate your skills and knowledge, how to successfully navigate the process and effectively demonstrate your competencies against the required qualification standard.

The bad news is, whilst your assessor and training provider are there to support you, they can’t do the work for you. It is your responsibility to provide the evidence to support your application, so you will need to actively gather the documentation you need and engage in the process to demonstrate your skills successfully. So, if you’re hoping for a ‘lazy way out,’ this isn’t it!

However, if you are confident that you can produce the required evidence to fast-track your qualification, jumping on board the RPL assessment process is absolutely worth the effort!