Education Forum: CVS Candidate Refresher Course and SAVE Instructor Seminar

By Stephen Kirk, CVS Life, FSAVE, FAIA, LEED AP – Vice President – Education, SAVE International

Last month I summarized SAVE International education opportunities. For members, this is of paramount importance. This month I will highlight two courses that were offered at the SAVE International 2017 Value Summit in Philadelphia this past August.

The first course was a VE Refresher; Revisions and Exam Preparation. This was taught in a four hour Sunday morning seminar by Stephen Garrett, CVS, Member of the SAVE Certification Board. It was intended to help CVS candidates to bridge the gap between the old Module I and II courses and the new Value Methodology Fundamentals 1 and 2 courses. Steve discussed certification board changes to the Module I and II courses. The main focus was on function analysis and other core competency elements of the new certification exam. For those that are seeking CVS certification, this was an important pre-conference session.

The second course was an Instructor Update & Training Seminar. This was taught in a four hour Sunday afternoon session by Stephen Garrett and myself. This seminar discussed certification board changes to the Module I and II courses. The new courses will be called Value Methodology Fundamentals 1 and 2. Each will be a minimum of 32 hours of instruction.

This seminar reviewed the new course requirements, the contents for each and new mandatory power point training slides to be used by all instructors. For those that offer SAVE certified Module I and II courses, attendance was required to obtain SAVE approval to teach these courses in the future. For those instructors that could not attend, an online course will be available in the near future. This training serves to meet the certification requirement to gain approval to teach these courses in the future.

The Certification Board anticipates the new training materials and exams to be available to qualified instructors by the end of this year.

These are some of the new SAVE educational opportunities for our members. Next year’s Value Summit in Austin, Texas will continue to expand on these opportunities to go beyond the fundamentals to a new “Mastery” of the subject.