You can find the draft meeting minutes from our January meeting here. 

The BOD Meeting for will be hosted September 17th-19th, 2024, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The agenda and BOD packet will be sent to you closer to the meeting. 

You can review the 2023 audit  here. 

We are excited to gather our exam development committees for Water Treatment, Wastewater Treatment, Collection, and Distribution  April 16-18 in Las Vegas, Nevada for an Item Review Workshop. After the successful completion of our Job Analysis survey and item writing efforts last year, this meeting will kick off the next phase of our exam development process. Following our Item Review Workshop, we will be able to begin assembling test forms and determining cut scores. This is a crucial step in the release of our new exams later this year, and are excited to bring our Subject Matter Experts together in April.

We are in the process of migrating all CBT clients to a new scheduling system with PSI, Unified Candidate Scheduling System (UCS 2.0). We are excited to move our programs onto this new platform which is a modern, robust, and proven tool for candidate scheduling and management and should solve several of the pitfalls we see as the older system is deprecated.  We anticipated this migration to be completed by this juncture, however, a few challenges have prevented us from making as smooth a transition as we’d expected.

The reporting functions are not working as they previously did due to the new system’s inability to communicate with the old system. We continue to reinforce to PSI the fact that accurate reporting is imperative, and we need the system to be fully functional. Alas we cannot make the programmers write new code any faster than they are able. In the meantime, we attempt to allay the frustrations of every program encountering struggles through thoughtful problem-solving and communication. We have primarily been able to provide each program the information they require using alternative methods.

Reporting issues aside, there are many great features and upgrades in this new system that weren’t available in the old. The UCS2 scheduling platform is much more candidate centric and intuitive. Each program has a customizable dedicated landing page so a logo, background image, and program specific language may be incorporated. This allows candidates to easily recognize they are in the correct spot when scheduling their exams. There are two portals for each program in the UCS2 platform; one is the new candidate portal that allows each candidate to create a personal account to schedule, reschedule, access payment receipts, and view test results and score reports of their completed exams at their leisure.  The program’s login allows them to see all the information in their candidates’ portals, review scheduling, obtain reports, and make any necessary updates.

The UCS2 system also provides the opportunity to implement Remote Proctoring (RP) for all CBT programs. This modality was unavailable in the previous system, so only select CBT programs had access to it. If you are interested in pursuing this for your program, please let us know and we can begin discussion on implementation and timelines for these services.

To begin creating the program outlined in the WPI Training Certification whitepaper we formed a team of volunteers at the IiC24 conference. The team meets for one hour every three weeks. Inside the group, we’ve created subcommittees to focus on each of the three pillars and our messaging. These groups meet independently of the entire team. We put together a 12-month timeline in the hopes we will have the first edition of the program ready to present at IiC25 next January.

We determined that it would be wise to gauge industry interest in a Training Certification for the water sector by performing market research, so we’ve requested a cost proposal. To get a truly representative sample our team of volunteers will be involved in the process and assist with developing the questions and determining who the survey is disseminated to (small, medium, & large areas). We’re in the process of editing a short preamble for the survey that will succinctly summarize the intent behind this initiative to hopefully allay the unfounded concerns we have encountered that WPI will be implementing a mandated program that will drastically change the landscape of CEU approval and delivery requirements. WPI plans to be completely transparent with the results of this research for anyone who is interested.

We are also planning a Job Analysis (JA) for industry trainers. We’ve begun work on creating an application to build a Subject Matter Expert (SME) Committee. The committee will provide technical assistance to our psychometric partner, PSI, while creating the questions for the JA whose results will provide the important job tasks performed by industry trainers. SMEs will verify the technical accuracy, clarity, and comprehensiveness of the job tasks, and identify the capabilities (e.g., knowledge, skills, and abilities) required to perform them on a task-by-task basis, so a link can be established between each task statement and requisite capability. The results of the JA will be used to create the certification exam for the program just like WPI’s other certification exams.

If needed, please complete the expense report below and submit to Paul, Tom, and Haley for processing.

WPI Expense Form 2024