Independent Governance Expert — Qualifications & Assessment

Overview

Uphold Entry Standards. Challenge Assumptions. Shape the Future of a Global Profession.

Professional qualifications only have value if the standards behind them are trusted.

The Qualifications and Assessment Committee (QAC) of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors exists to ensure that trust is earned and maintained. Across more than 140 countries and diverse educational, cultural and regulatory environments, RICS regulated membership defines what it means to be a competent and ethical professional. The QAC provides the independent oversight and governance that ensures RICS professional qualifications and assessments remain credible, rigorous and globally respected.

RICS is seeking two independent members who bring the expertise, judgement and open mindset to help shape what assessed competence looks like in a rapidly changing world.

The QAC's remit is broad and far-reaching. It recommends policy and frameworks for professional competence, entry and admission to the profession, and transfer between grades of membership. It oversees assessment standards and methodologies, ensuring they are applied consistently and effectively across global markets. It safeguards education and qualification standards, scrutinising the accreditation of university programmes, post-qualification registers and credentials. And it ensures that everything it does holds up to the highest standards of public interest governance across every jurisdiction in which RICS operates.

That breadth is what makes the role uniquely influential. The Committee does not simply review proposals. It helps shape the future expectations of professional qualifications and improve the assessment process within RICS, not simply assuring their current operation. Artificial intelligence, digital assessment, evolving workforce expectations and new models of professional development are reshaping what competence looks like and how it should be assessed.

The QAC will be at the centre of how RICS responds to those shifts.

As Keith Thomas FRICS, QAC Chair, puts it: "The QAC's role is to act as guardians of the entry standards." Not in a passive, procedural sense, but actively asking the difficult questions, pressure-testing the evidence and ensuring that decisions can withstand the most rigorous external scrutiny.

Whilst the QAC's oversight spans the full breadth of RICS' qualifications and competence framework, developments in education and assessment, including the RICS-wide Qualifications and Professional Development programme make this a particularly compelling moment to join.

These appointments will not just be oversight roles in a steady-state environment. They will be active, substantive governance contributions during one of the most consequential periods of change in RICS' education and assessments.

Independent members of the QAC bring specialist knowledge and independent judgement, helping shape the future direction of professional competence, qualifications and assessment within RICS, not simply assuring current operations.

Your contribution will span scrutiny of professional competence frameworks and entry requirements, oversight of assessment methodologies and the standards applied to assessors, decisions on the accreditation and recognition of education programmes, and the ongoing development of qualification policy that must remain coherent and credible across the globe with differing legal, educational and professional expectations.

You will also help ensure that RICS' qualification frameworks remain future-focused, globally relevant and credible as the profession evolves, without losing the standards that underpin public trust.

Throughout, the expectation is that independent members provide genuine challenge, bringing external perspectives that interrogate established assumptions, defend evidence-based positions under pressure and help the Committee make decisions that are proportionate, defensible and in the public interest.

We are making two appointments, each intended to bring distinct expertise to complement the existing Committee.…