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NCCA and ISO/IEC 17024 Accreditation Readiness Checklist for Certification Programs
A practical checklist of 10 best practices to ensure seamless compliance at every stage of the accreditation process.
True accreditation readiness comes from designing your program to meet standards naturally, not scrambling to pass an audit after the fact. The goal is to make readiness a byproduct of how you operate: continuously identifying gaps, strengthening your evidence base, and maintaining processes that are documented, repeatable, and defensible. Use this checklist to keep your certification program aligned, efficient, and always prepared for review.
1. Clearly Define Your Accreditation Goals
Strong accreditation starts with understanding your purpose. Clarify whether you are seeking accreditation to enhance credibility, meet stakeholder expectations, or align with industry standards. Decide upfront whether NCCA Standards, ISO/IEC 17024, or both best match your goals. Documenting which aspects of the program fall under accreditation helps everyone understand the scope and avoids confusion later on.
2. Set Up Independent Decision-Making
Fairness and impartiality are non-negotiable. Create an autonomous governance structure with bylaws, policies, and procedures that explicitly manage and prevent conflicts of interest. Routinely verifying that documentation remains aligned and current helps keep decisions transparent and credible.
3. Keep Your Program Aligned With Real-World Practice
Your exams must reflect what practitioners actually do. Regularly bring together qualified experts from your industry to discuss and confirm what knowledge and skills matter most. By routinely refreshing your understanding of current practice, you ensure your credential stays valuable and meaningful.
4. Build a Consistent Exam Development Process
Structured consistency ensures good exams result in great credentials. Document a clear, repeatable workflow for item writing, technical review, bias review, form assembly, publication, and records retention. Having a clear, well-defined approach that covers drafting, validation, approval, and final release ensures each exam version is created, reviewed, and archived to the same high standards.
5. Protect Your Exam and Manage Your Partners
An exam's integrity is only as strong as its weakest safeguard. Regularly assess security controls, identify risks, and actively manage vendor relationships to protect exam content and delivery. Establishing strong oversight and clear communication keeps exams protected and secure.
6. Monitor and Maintain Exam Quality and Fairness
Reliable exams are actively managed, not passively relied upon. Continuously monitor candidate results and exam form performance data to identify issues early. Watch for unexpected trends, performance gaps, or inconsistencies across exam forms. Addressing concerns promptly ensures reliability, fairness, and credibility remain intact across administrations.
7. Communicate Clearly and Consistently With Candidates
Clear, consistent communication reduces confusion and disputes. Maintain a Candidate Handbook and related web content that accurately reflect current policies, using plain language to explain eligibility, application steps, scheduling, accommodations, appeals, and issue resolution. Aligned messaging strengthens your program's credibility with candidates, employers, and regulators.
8. Organize Your Documentation and Records
Well-organized documentation turns audits into confirmations rather than investigations. Set up a simple yet robust system to organize and secure key documents, decisions, and historical records. Establish clear retention and destruction policies so materials are kept only as long as needed and handled appropriately. Keep them updated so all critical information remains accurate, current, and easy to locate.
9. Regularly Check Your Processes and Improve Continuously
Exceptional credentials grow from continually optimizing your systems and processes. Build simple feedback loops into day-to-day operations so issues, delays, and workarounds are identified and addressed quickly. Turning lessons learned into small, regular improvements keeps your program efficient, resilient, and easier to manage over time.
10. Keep Credentials Meaningful Over Time
Credentials only stay credible if they continue to reflect real, current practice. Define practical ways for certificants to demonstrate ongoing competence, such as continuing education, periodic reassessment, or other structured maintenance activities, and review those requirements as the field evolves. Thoughtful, well-managed maintenance requirements preserve the credential's value for stakeholders.
The Bottom Line
Accreditation should confirm what is already true: that your program is fair, defensible, and aligned with current practice. When you build those qualities into everyday operations, compliance follows naturally and your credential continues to earn the trust of certificants, employers, and the public.
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