Institute of Professional Editors Limited

For me, the road to accreditation started at the joint editors/indexers conference held in Canberra in 2001. During the plenary session, indexer Lyn Farkas commented on the inadequacy of both professions' earnings in relation to their skills and knowledge. She also pointed out that both were ageing professions, with a high percentage of members over the age of 50, with no accreditation programs for either profession, and that we needed to attract younger members.

A growing number of young (and not so young) people are now being drawn to the profession, as indicated by our societies' new members and the number of queries we receive about editing courses and editing as a profession; this is a very welcome development. However, in other ways the profession hasn't changed much since 2001.

Editing remains an undervalued and largely invisible profession. In April I attended the launch of the Queensland government's Smart State strategy, stage 2. The launch was attended by scientists, senior academics, heads of government departments, leading businessmen, and representatives of community organisations - the kind of people who are largely outside our usual market. From two or three conversations, I formed the very clear impression that as far as these people were concerned, editors were not the kind of people they would ever think about, much less suspect of being organised to the degree that we are; that editors remain largely invisible to too many people who need our services.

Too many editors have difficulty in earning the kind of income that their skills and versatility should command. Members of our profession have an extraordinary range of skills, qualifications and accomplishments, yet we all know first-class editors who have difficulty in earning an income commensurate with their skills. ‘Genteel poverty' was the phrase Lyn Farkas used in Canberra to describe this situation; her words have stuck in my mind ever since.

Let me give you a couple of examples. I have seen a project manager employ an inexperienced editor at $19 an hour; this is gross exploitation. Because I was familiar with the text she was working on, I also felt distinctly cynical about the project manager's explanation that it only a proofreading job and doubtful how good a job this girl would be able to do.

Fifteen months ago, one of my Queensland colleagues won an extension of an international contract for her organisation purely because of her outstanding editing skills and project management. After the new contract had been awarded, her manager stated that she and an admin. assistant could do all the editing needed on the new project, despite the fact that the clients had stated very clearly in writing their reason for awarding the contract. You will not be amazed to learn that this manager knew sweet fanny adam about editing and certainly did not value it as a profession.

I'm sure many of you could describe similar experiences. You may also have lost work because a potential client had previously engaged a so-called editor who then botched the job very thoroughly. Understandably, such clients may well become extremely distrustful of editors and believe that no editor is likely to add value to their work.

None of this will come as any surprise to you. The question many people raised in December last year and are still raising is whether accreditation will improve this situation. Do we need an accreditation program at all?

The answer is YES.

As one of my colleagues from IPE (formerly known as CASE) has observed, national industry standards increasingly require professions and training organisations to have assessment and accreditation processes. Having no accreditation process doesn't help new editors; it leaves them to float. Accreditation is also a plus for people who move interstate or overseas; it is perhaps more transportable than a course from a place many people in the new state or country haven't heard of.

Will accreditation improve the situation I have described? We hope that it will, in conjunction with other activities at national level. The aim of the accreditation program we are now developing is to create a scheme comparable in many ways with registration/ accreditation schemes already well established in many professions, such as accounting, engineering, law, psychology and public relations. Specifically, the aim stated in the report circulated last December with the ballots on accreditation, which you probably still have stuffed in a drawer somewhere, was to place accreditation within the reach of most working editors: that is, accreditation was to be neither absurdly easy nor impossibly difficult.

I believe accreditation of editors will help members of our profession to gain recognition of their skills. This is at least the first step. If we don't take that first step, we have no hope of advancing our profession. Our long-term aim is to create a situation where accreditation is seen by editors as a normal step in their careers and by clients and potential clients as an indication that they can expect a good job from an accredited editor.

As you would already be aware, the Accreditation Board has been created to set up such a scheme. The Board consists of a delegate from each State/territory society, plus a representative from the Institute of Professional Editors (IPE) and an assessors' delegate. The inaugural meeting of the Board took place in Sydney in May. Members of the Board have begun work on the practical details of the accreditation scheme, based on the final report which accompanied the ballots in December 2004.

The Board's brief is to establish a scheme which will be transparent, consistent and objective. It will take into account professional development, formal qualifications, including editing/publishing courses, employment and representative jobs. But above all, it will be performance and evidence-based; assessment of applicants will be competency-based assessment.

 I must admit that when I first read the report, I found it extremely daunting. I thought, ‘I'll never get accreditation under this system', and I've been working as an editor, first part-time and then full-time, for more than 25 years. I know many editors who felt the same way. So I understand why so many people would think they have Buckley's. But an interesting thing happened when we started looking at our first critical question, the type of evidence we would require: the process began to look much less intimidating when we broke it down into smaller items.

The kind of evidence assessors would require could include correspondence with clients and designers, style guides used and developed, before-and-after online products, references, and work-in-progress, that is, copies of work you have undertaken with marked or tracked changes to show what you have actually done. That is most important. Work-in-progress could include voluntary, unpaid work and could consist of as little as 20 pages. And you may need to submit only one manuscript.

Assessment will be based on the Australian Standards for Editing Practice. The second critical aspect for us was the question of minimum standards. In other words, what is the minimum standard of performance required to demonstrate competence? Applicants will be required to demonstrate that they have achieved a minimum standard of competence in editing, but will be assessed only against those standards applying to the work they currently do, e.g. copyediting, project management, and online editing. They will not be asked to address every one of the standards; we do not expect people to jump through impossible hoops.

Both applicants and assessors will be provided with guidelines and instructions, to make their task less time-consuming and spell out what the Board expects of them. We have considered ways of making the Standards easier to use on both sides.

We are well aware that the Standards were completed five years ago and need to be updated. For example, the people working on the Standards will look at expanding some sections and adding a section on online editing.

We have also discussed the addition of performance criteria to the Standards where necessary. Those of you who have worked with TAFE or another registered training organisation would be familiar with the use of performance criteria to supplement elements of competency; they are provided both to students and to assessors or markers, so both sides know exactly what is required of them. This would also ensure that the process is as objective as humanly possible.

How will applications for accreditation be handled? First of all, your application will be sent interstate, to an assessor who works in the same area as you do, e.g. corporate editing, online editing, fiction editing or editing illustrated children's books. This should eliminate conflict of interest. In addition, assessors who share some clients with the applicants or may be a friend of the editor concerned will be expected to disqualify themselves. Assessors who know the person applying for accreditation and hate their guts should also disqualify themselves from these cases on the grounds that they cannot make a fair assessment.   You are unlikely to find out who assessed your application.

All applications, supporting evidence and assessors' recommendations will then be sent on to an assessors' panel whose members will possess the range of skills and experience needed to assess these applications. The panel members will then make a decision to award accreditation, seek additional evidence or deny accreditation. So individual assessors will only be making recommendations; they will not be making the decision to award or not award accreditation. That will be done by a panel. For most applicants, the panel's decision will be the end of the matter.

There will be an appeal procedure. People who are denied accreditation will be able to appeal to the panel, the Accreditation Board and the Institute of Professional Editors. Applicants and assessors will use standard forms to maintain transparency and consistency.

Our first pool of assessors will consist of distinguished editors nominated by their own societies. These will be editors highly respected in their societies for their skill, depth and breadth of experience and contribution to the profession. Those who gain accreditation will be eligible to join the pool of assessors. All assessors would be required to sign confidentiality agreements, that is, they would not be discussing applications and evidence with anybody other than panel members and members of the Accreditation Board and IPE. They would also be required to keep all documents in a locked filing cabinet.

The Board is planning to set up a secretariat to handle applications and assessors' reports and communicate results to Board members, also to maintain a paper trail.

Please remember that this is still a draft plan. We have an enormous amount of work to do on the practicalities and we welcome your comments on this proposal. We want to hear your concerns so we can achieve the most workable scheme possible.

This scheme will not be commencing in the very near future. In the first place, the Accreditation Board (AB) will not be calling for applications for accreditation before late 2006. The processes we are working on will not be cast in concrete and will be reviewed after the program has been in operations for 12 months, but we must make sure that the program we offer editors will be workable to begin with. This is not a light undertaking.

At this stage we're looking at one level of accreditation, according to the brief given in the December report. The financial estimates included in that report are based on a projection of 200 applications in the first year, then 50 each for the following two years. These are not pre-determined limits; if more than the projected number of editors apply for accreditation, the Board will certainly process all those applications.

It is important to remember that accreditation will not be a stand-alone program. While the Board will be responsible for the administration of the scheme and the practicalities involved, our activities will be closely tied in with those of a formal national organisation. And the Institute's activities will certainly include promotion of the profession; this is essential if editing is to become the highly valued and well-paid profession it should be.

Other Institute activities will also affect the success of the accreditation program. They will include revision of the Standards; this revision will be crucial to an effective accreditation scheme. The people working on the Standards will also be contacting educational institutions and employers to gauge their use of the Standards; the results of this investigation should be very helpful in establishing ties between training providers, the Accreditation Board and IPE and perhaps in influencing the content of courses to reflect accreditation requirements in the future.

In terms of structure, the Accreditation Board will be a subsidiary of the Institute of Professional Editors; it will be a separate body but will answer to the Institute board. Financially, the Accreditation Board and its activities will be almost entirely self-funded: that is, with one exception all Board activities will be funded by a combination of sponsorship and payments made by applicants for accreditation. The effect will be that the Accreditation Board will not be seeking money from our societies, with that one exception. Our activities will be funded by sponsorships to begin with and then by a mixture of sponsorships and fees when applications for accreditation begin to come in.

The exception is the provision of insurance and legal cover for assessors, AB and IPE members. We would be extremely foolish to assume that nobody would ever think of suing the assessors, the Accreditation Board or the Institute over failure to secure accreditation, to believe that editors don't behave like that. We would also be very unreasonable if we expected our assessors to work without such protection or to pay the necessary insurance expenses themselves. Many freelance editors already have to deal with clients' expectations that they take on heavy professional indemnity payments for the uncertain prospect of work. We would also start to haemorrhage assessors if even one was left to face a legal suit without such protection; indeed, we would have great difficulty in recruiting assessors at all. One distinguished Queensland editor told me she wouldn't consider taking on an assessor's responsibilities without insurance protection.  Because the assessors would be working indirectly for IPE, the Institute will organise the cover our assessors need. Assessors will be working for the Institute under some form of contract.

I cannot emphasise too strongly how important the existence and effective functioning of a formal national organisation is to the future success of accreditation. Without that national organisation, accreditation would have no teeth. It would certainly be possible for one of our societies, presumably one of the larger ones, to organise a state or territory-based pilot accreditation scheme, provided they could find sufficient volunteers and enough funding to take on the enormous amount of work involved. That is in itself highly questionable. You have to ask, who would be prepared to take the job on under these circumstances? 

And it is important to be realistic about the outcomes of such a scheme. However soundly-based the scheme was, it would still lack the authority of a formal national organisation of the type that exists in other professions with accreditation or registration. It would be a case of ‘And who's accrediting you? Oh, the Society of Editors (Queensland)!' Our societies have earned respect in their own states/territories from those who are aware of our profession and its value, but we don't have that kind of clout.

When our members returned their votes last December, many expressed their concern that all publishers and other potential employers would demand accreditation in a contractor or employee and that non-accredited editors would be unable to obtain work.

This will not happen. First of all, it will many years for a combination of accreditation, promotion of the profession and national representation of editors to change the thinking of publishers and other clients. You're not talking about months here but years - many years.

Then, as you would be well aware, obtaining work with publishers and individual clients is largely achieved by word of mouth. That also will not change. What may change is the ability of supervising editors and in-house editors (people like me) to recommend and appoint accredited editors and to negotiate more satisfactory payments with managers who do not at present value editing as a profession. Some managing editors and in-house editors may be able to use this weapon with managers who see no problem in employing editors who may be less than competent, at miserable rates, because they attach no value to the work and cut-price editing is more consistent with their bottom line.

How many of you have had the experience of being undercut by another editor? You obtain a job only to find that the client proposes to pay you peanuts because that's what they've paid previous editors and they don't see the true value of the work or appreciate the skills required. If you're a well-established editor, you can afford to turn the work down or to negotiate a satisfactory payment; if you're struggling to find work, you may decide to accept the offer because you need the money, knowing that you're being exploited. So the undercutting circus continues.  Accreditation and promotion of the profession in our present and potential markets may help improve this situation; there are no guarantees, but we must try.

 Senior editors who have established a reputation for excellent work over many years and therefore have no difficulty in finding work will not benefit directly from accreditation, as many people pointed out last December. But accreditation may enable more editors to achieve that position and establish their own reputations over the years. Those of you who are already in this position will be well aware how long it took you to get there. We are asking senior editors who have benefited from the profession to give something back to it, to help other competent editors who may be struggling to find work and gain adequate payment to achieve the same position. In fact, we are asking successful editors to look beyond their own careers and businesses to the future of the profession. They can make a great difference to that future. 

There is one major difference between editors and other professionals. In other professions, members are required to gain certain qualifications before they can be considered for registration or accreditation, and may also be required to complete additional studies if they wish to gain greater opportunities. For example, accountants who want to get on in their profession are required to successfully complete further studies leading to Chartered Practising Accountant status. This simplifies their registration process and also simplifies entry to the profession.

By contrast, as you would be well aware, no such requirements exist for editors. We are not a homogenous group in terms of qualifications and, unlike other professions, we are rarely able to secure employment for graduates on the strength of course completion.

Our profession is split into two major groups, according to qualifications and experience. A large number of experienced editors have no formal qualifications whatsoever in editing; they have learned their skills by experience and perhaps also through in-house mentoring schemes. This group includes most of our senior editors, including many of the top people in our profession; most editors over the age of 50 would fall into this category.

On the other hand, we have the editors and would-be editors who are working through or have completed a course of study in editing and publishing, but very often have great difficulty in gaining experience. Many people commented in December on the difficulty they would have in finding work so they could produce evidence. And we know from conversations with our own members just how true that is. In our societies, we encourage new members to offer their services to voluntary organisations, sports clubs, churches and any other organisation, free of charge if necessary, just to get a start in the profession. It's not the ideal way to start, but given the current state of the publishing industry, it looks like the way of the future. That is an option the AB would also urge newcomers to the profession to consider; we will certainly not be restricting evidence to paid work.

 Traditionally, the standards and values of the profession were based on book editing, and employment in a publishing house was the accepted way of gaining skills and achieving those standards. However, we now have a large number of editors who entered the profession by very different routes; many people have just fallen into editing, as I did, and many good editors will never work for a traditional publishing house. The scope of the market has expanded to include self-publishing, multimedia production and online editing, and our accreditation scheme must accommodate this wide range of specialist areas and skills.

The program we are working on must therefore provide the flexibility to enable all applicants to produce satisfactory evidence of their competence. Again, many people expressed concern about their ability to produce such evidence, because of the nature of their work. And we do understand that, for example, somebody working on classified or commercial-in-confidence material will have real difficulty; we will make every effort to accommodate such applicants and we welcome all suggestions on ways to overcome this problem.

On the other hand, manuscripts with the desired number of bugs in them are already used anonymously in training courses. It may be possible to submit copies of sections of manuscripts or web texts you have worked on without breaching confidentiality agreements with your employer or clients, particularly if the works in question have already been published. To do this, you would have to obtain permission from employers and clients, and we recognise that it will not always be given. This is one of many aspects we will need to check with the Arts Law Centre Australia in Sydney. It will be a problem for in-house editors, but is likely to be a greater problem for freelances. Just remember that the assessors would all have signed a confidentiality agreement with the Board and undertaken not to discuss applications or evidence with anybody other than the assessors' panels and members of the AB and IPE.

Several editors commented in December that they would have difficulty in producing supporting evidence such as correspondence with authors because their negotiations with authors and/or project managers are done verbally. As one who has worked with in-house clients in the same manner more often than not, I sympathise with them; that is certainly a problem with past jobs. I can only suggest that now is a good time to change our work practices, with accreditation requirements in mind. It should not take much extra effort to make sure we have a written record of all negotiations with clients, designers, project managers, content reviewers, etc. Such work practices will make it much easier for us to demonstrate competence in the relevant standards and also help us in our everyday work.

The Board has requested a workshop at the national editors' conference in October, to help us nut out the problems and find out what will work best for both applicants and assessors. A couple of dummy applications presenting different challenges will be considered by a panel of assessors; assessors and audience, in their role of potential applicants, will be invited to comment on what does and doesn't work and make their own suggestions. This valuable feedback will help us finalise the accreditation processes we will use.

The AB will be promoting the accreditation scheme vigorously through the delegates' societies. One method of doing so will be a column called CredAbility that will appear in all our newsletters; CredAbility will consist of brief tips on how to obtain accreditation - a newsy how-to guide presented in instalments.

I ask you all to give the accreditation scheme a chance. There will certainly be plenty of challenges along the way for everyone concerned and the benefits will take years to achieve, but we have to start somewhere. Accreditation and the other national developments accompanying it will provide real benefits we cannot hope to achieve for our members now.

[This is the slightly amended text of a talk given to the Society of Editors (NSW) on 5 July 2005. Robin Bennett is the Chair of the Accreditation Board; she is also the Acting President of the Society of Editors (Qld) Inc. and the Queensland delegate to IPE.]