May 5, 2017
IFMA and RICS unveil combined qualifications platform 0
The collaboration between IFMA and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is, for the first time, offering a combined suite of credentials and professional qualifications for facilities management in a single, online academy platform at www.fm.training. IFMA and RICS first launched the platform in December 2016 as an initial step toward ‘leveraging the combined authority of two of the world’s premier built environment professional organisations for the support of FM education and career advancement’. IFMA centralised its professional credential training — the foundational Facility Management Professional, the targeted Sustainability Facility Professional and the Facility Management Learning System, which supports learning for the Certified Facility Manager certification — on the academy in early April. Now, RICS has added the final critical piece of the IFMA-RICS suite of credentials and professional qualifications to the platform: the internationally recognised AssocRICS and MRICS professional designations.
November 25, 2016
Reducing paper-weight is the key to maintaining a healthy business in the digital age 0
by Chas Moloney • Comment, Technology
The idea of creating a paperless office has been circulating for at least 40 years. Business Week famously forecast its arrival in 1975, predicting that paper would be on its way out by 1980 and dead by 1990. However, it’s almost 2017 and even with new and innovative digital technologies that enable us to operate in a highly connected world, the paper-light office is still far from our reality. Yet institutions from a variety of different sectors are leading the way when it comes to driving initiatives forward to going paperless and paper-light. For example, to address the need of approximately 12 million people in the UK that annually fill in a self-assessment tax form, plans have been put in place by the government to give individual digital accounts, aiming to allow more than 50 million individuals and small businesses to manage their tax affairs online. As a result, costs will be significantly cut by erasing expensive and laborious bureaucratic processes in the long-term, whilst fundamentally streamlining and simplifying intricate business services and applications.
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