Management standards reclassified

Providers using Field Business standards should be aware that subfield Management is lapsing. All unit standards housed there have been reclassified.

In 2004, it was decided to change how the unit standards in Field Business were classified. Until then, unit standards were developed and classified according to a number of criteria, including the target audience. For example, there were standards to do with work teams in domains First Line Management and Management - Developing and Coordinating People, and Human Resource Management in domains First Line Management, Small Business Management, and HRM itself.

"This caused some confusion as unit standards dealing with like content were scattered throughout the subfield Management and in some cases were spread throughout the whole field e.g. standards about financial matters or marketing," says NZQA qualifications development facilitator Michel Norrish.

"This rationale for organising the field was also more in line with current thinking about business. After sector consultation, the decision was made to group standards on similar topics together, and to allow subfield Management to lapse. This was achieved by reclassifying the unit standards elsewhere in the field."

Michel says some reclassifications have been quite straightforward: the Human Resource Management unit standards, for example, were all reclassified into the same domain in subfield Business Operations and Development. The First Line Management standards, however, went to six other domains, and the Small Business Management standards to seven.

The destination domain of every unit standard in subfield Management can be identified through the relevant report in the Review Summary section of the NZQA website.