Every Bureau of International Professional Standards standard is drafted with an employer council: a group of practising organisations that hire against the discipline. They are not an advisory panel in the decorative sense. They can and do reject drafts.
How a standard actually gets written
- Scoping — is there a real capability here, distinct from existing standards?
- Capability drafting — six areas, written by practitioners rather than educators.
- Level descriptors — what each of the six levels means in this discipline.
- Council review — the point at which drafts most often get sent back.
- Public consultation, pilot cohort, publication.
The most useful thing a council does is tell us when a descriptor sounds right but describes nobody they have ever hired.
A disagreement worth recording
The Project Leadership council pushed back hard on an early draft that treated reporting as an administrative task. Their position was that how a delivery lead reports bad news is one of the most revealing things about them, and that it deserved to be assessed directly. It now is.
Joining a council
Councils are open to organisations that hire against the standard in question. The commitment is roughly one half-day per quarter during an active drafting cycle.