 I have a prop. Not much of one, but it's a prop. Hi everybody, this brief talk is called Organisational Learning. Organisational Learning, its subtitle is Certifiably Professional. My name is Al Montague. Oh, it's getting ahead of me. My name is Al Montague, and last year in 2011, I became certified as a certified professional in learning and performance. CPLP. Now, we've been talking about defining AI. What does that mean to us? Defining professionalism maybe is the next step to that in terms of AI. I'm going to tell you briefly about why I chose certification, why professionalism was important to me in my field, what I got measured against as a professional, and maybe ask some questions about what that means for our relevance for the AI community. I chose it because I became a trainer kind of accidentally. I'm sure a whole bunch of us have done. I was relatively good at something. I asked to show somebody else that stuff, and I did more of that and more of that and more of that until I was a trainer. Then when I realized that was my profession, I got really engaged with it. I got passionate about it. I learned about it. I presented about it. I read about it, all sorts of stuff like that. I realized there was nothing to differentiate me from who thrown myself passionately into this world than there was from the people who just arrived there. I felt there needed to be some sort of mark to differentiate that. There wasn't anything out there to differentiate that. Then I discovered there was. The American Society of Training and Development, the OECD, had built this thing called a competency model. They had spent hours and hours and thousands of dollars in building this thing called a competency model. The competency model was about saying, if you've got some foundational competencies, the easy version of the whole thing, but you've got some foundational competencies, which are things you know about. We'll talk about that in a second. Areas of expertise, the stuff you know. I think I'll go back to that. Then the foundational competencies and areas of expertise, there are roles you can perform as a professional. Foundational competencies are the things that you have to be good at to be considered a professional. For workplace learning and performance, as it's called, they're in three categories and you see them up there. They're about the way in which you interact with the people around you, the way in which you interact with yourself, and the way in which you interact with the organization that you're with. These foundational competencies are tested as part of the certification process. They're tested in a work product submission. You have to give them a piece of work you've done that proves that you did all of this stuff when you were doing something to do with your work. That's kind of cool for me. I thought that kind of separated out from things where you just took a test. The other thing, so I would argue that the question for me is, I know that those workplace learning and performance foundational competencies, I know really well. I think they might be a really good base if we were to talk about what the foundational competencies are for someone involved in the applied improvisational work. The next thing is the areas of expertise. There's a whole bunch of them. There's nine of them. You have to learn all of these things because the other part of the certification is a test, 150 questions. That shows that for every five people who take that test, one of them doesn't make it. The pass rate is 80%. You have to pass 75% of those 150 questions and the clicker on that is each of these areas you have to get more than 50% on. You can't even say, well, I don't really want to know that much about managing organizational knowledge. You have to know the whole breadth of it. That was the thing that I found cool. It was the breadth of knowledge and the depth of the foundational competencies. For implied improvisation, I have some thoughts but no clear ideas about what they might be. Maybe that's an area for us to discuss. The final thing is roles. If you know a bunch of stuff and how to apply that bunch of stuff using some certain solid foundational skills, then you can be a professional and paid as it. In the workplace learning and performance field, there's a whole bunch of titles there that you could be considered as a professional. For me, the interesting question is, well, we've got like 200 people in this room. I think it's probably about 170 to 200 different things that we do here. I would be really interested to work out what those generic titles and roles would be for what we did to make a professional and applied improvisation. My final question here is, we are the applied improvisation network. We are defining all the time what it is to be applied improvisational. I'm wondering if we need to define what it means to be a professional in that field. If we do, this might be a start for that conversation. I hope in these couple of minutes I've given you a chance to think about that and decide whether or not that's an area part of a change we want to see or be. Thank you.