GuideSpace
A FaceBook for SA
River Guides
ANNOUNCEMENT
River guides will soon
have a chance to enter all your guiding experience
and qualifications on a Facebook type website. This
is to help you and the whole river industry network
for jobs, qualifications, opportunities and
contacts. The idea was born at a river guide
workshop
held in KwaZulu/Natal in December, convened by
Zingela River Safaris and led by old riverman Graeme
Addison. Attending the workshop were a number of
senior river guides, operators and newcomers
interested in getting into guiding. If you want to
learn more about this social networking site which
is currently in development, send an email to graemea [at] riverman.co.za
or
neil [at] calibrand.co.za
or go to
www.riverman.co.za
under "Guiding". We'd like to hear from you and
hear your suggestions about how a site like this
could work to the benefit of all!
BACKGROUND
The GuideSpace
system is not yet online but it will be soon. Like
Facebook, it will allow you to enter all your
details so that others can look you up. It will also
form an essential component of the Portfolio of
Evidence needed for the National Qualifications
Framework (NQF) guide assessment and registration.
By centralising all information about the guiding
fraternity (and hopefully, operators and others in
the river game too) it will help you to sell your
skills and communicate with others about
opportunities. It will be easy to use and allow you
to put all your info in one place, password
protected if necessary.
The idea was
launched at the December workshop. GuideSpace for
river guides is not being flighted for private
profit or to represent any company or individual -
it is for the use of all, free, and should become a
central clearing house for the whole river industry.
Talks are under way with the APA and other
interests, such as universities, to work out how
best to use it.
WHY?
The December workshop dealt
with the issue of how to get experienced and
qualified rivers legalised as soon as possible under
the NQF system. For those who don't know, the NQF is
the government's official educational qualifications
network, and you are legally obliged as a working
guide to be qualified under it. This may come as a
surprise! The fact is that the APA has been covering
for you and has a training and qualifications system
in place. Yet all the signs point to a tightening up
of the official system, necessitating a serious
effort to get guides into the system. Graeme Addison
- a former university professor, and the man who
launched the river industry in SA during the early
eighties, as well as the first river guide training
in SA - is now pulling together the materials
needed to standardise the Assessment process. Neil,
who runs a training advisory service, is providing
the hardware and software tools to make it all
available online.
The idea is to
make assessment and registration as simple and quick
as possible, and as cheap as it can be. For those
who have plenty of experience and simply need to
fill in the forms and pay the fees for legal
recognition, it is a matter of gaining Recognition
of Prior learning (RPL). By using GuideSpace - a
service that will be free to access - you can put
your portfolio online for the assessors to look at.
They can then advise you of the assessment dates,
and on the day you are tested you either succeed or
fail according to strict industry standards. If you
pass, you can be registered and will be covered by
legislation. A major issue here is that unless you
are legal, it may be difficult to obtain insurance
in the event of accidents on your trips.
BENEFITS
For those who are
starting out in guiding, there is an alternative to
RPL through training and preparation for the
assessment. One of the main aims of the system will
be to provide guides with credits towards higher
qualifications such as Field Guiding. Once you hold
the river guide ticket you may go on to enhance your
career prospects by using the credits towards other
adventure guiding, along with environmental and
tourism qualifications. In other words, it will help
you on a career path and help to keep guides in the
river industry too - a big problem for operators.
The system is
being put together because on many rivers there are
unqualified guides working and risking both their
own financial security and those of their operators.
The system will also put guides and newcomers in
touch with trainers and assessors. There are
literally dozens of working guides who are totally
unknown to the industry or each other who will
benefit by becoming legalised. Are you one of them?
It's all to the good and neither Graeme nor Neil has
a financial interest in the system. Contact
Graeme or Neil to let them know you want to be
told when GuideSpace goes up online - it will
contain plenty of detail about the whole project.
There will also be a forum for the exchange of
views.
