In 1999, the International Organisation for Standardisation published a guideline that should have changed how every organisation measures professional training. It’s called ISO 10015: Quality Management — Guidelines for Competence Management and People Development. It requires, plainly, that organisations planning and delivering training evaluate whether that training achieved its intended effect on competence. Not whether staff attended. Whether anything changed. It’s a support standard to ISO 9001, which means any ISO 9001-certified organisation has at least a soft obligation to consider it. In the 26 years since it was published, the AEC sector has almost universally ignored it — not out of bad faith, but out of absence of a practical mechanism to comply. The mechanism now exists.
What ISO 10015 actually requires.
ISO 10015 describes a four-stage cycle: identify competence needs, plan training to meet them, deliver training, and evaluate whether the training produced the intended competence improvement. That fourth stage — the evaluation — is where the AEC CPD market has always stalled. The standard is explicit: evaluation must assess whether training has resulted in the desired competence being developed and applied. Satisfaction surveys don’t answer this question. Attendance records don’t answer it. The only data that answers it is structured evidence of whether attendees’ professional practice changed as a result. The standard isn’t asking for laboratory conditions or randomised control trials. It’s asking for a systematic approach to gathering evidence that training works. The reason this hasn’t happened in AEC CPD is not that the requirement is unreasonable — it’s that no independent instrument for capturing that evidence existed at scale. ISO 10015 has been sitting in the quality management stack of thousands of AEC organisations for 26 years, waiting for an instrument that would make its fourth stage practical.
What this means for ISO 9001-holding organisations.
Any AEC practice, manufacturer, or training provider holding ISO 9001 has, within its quality management system, a commitment to evidence-based training evaluation. ISO 10015 is the support standard that tells them how. In practice, most ISO 9001 audits for AEC organisations pass the training section on the basis of a training plan and attendance records, because auditors accept these as the available evidence. But the standard’s intent is clear. When a quality manager asks “how do we know our training worked?”, the honest answer — before a structured measurement instrument existed — was “we don’t, and our QMS doesn’t give us a way to find out.” That’s the gap FRAKT closes. A FRAKT Signal Report is a structured, third-party record of what attendees intended to do differently as a result of a specific training session. A FRAKT Impact Review is a written assessment of whether a training programme is achieving the competence development it’s designed to produce. Both are the output ISO 10015 Section 4.4 is asking for.
ISO 21001 and the provider’s obligation.
ISO 21001:2018 — the educational organisations management system standard — extends the evaluation obligation to providers of learning activities. Where ISO 10015 speaks to organisations consuming training, ISO 21001 speaks to organisations providing it. Any CPD provider who frames their work as educational — as all accredited AEC CPD providers do — has, under ISO 21001, an obligation to demonstrate that their learning activities produce the outcomes they claim. The FRAKT framework is designed exactly for this purpose. A provider who commissions a FRAKT Impact Review is not seeking a vanity metric — they’re generating the ISO 21001-aligned evidence of learning outcomes the standard requires. As client organisations increasingly align their procurement and supply chain standards with ISO 9001/ISO 10015, providers who cannot produce this evidence will face procurement disadvantage. Providers who already have it are ahead of the requirement curve.
The instrument that was missing.
ISO 10015 is 26 years old. The requirement to evaluate training effectiveness is not new — it has been embedded in quality management frameworks since before most of the professionals delivering AEC CPD today had qualified. What has been missing is not the requirement. It’s the instrument. CPD Impact provides that instrument — independently, at session level, with real attendee data rather than provider self-assessment. The standard nobody uses has been waiting for a practical tool. Here it is.
FAQs
ISO 10015 is an international standard (Quality Management: Guidelines for Competence Management and People Development) requiring organisations to evaluate whether training activities achieve their intended effect on professional competence. It has been in force since 1999 and is a support standard to ISO 9001. Any ISO 9001-certified AEC practice, manufacturer, or training provider has a soft obligation to operate a training evaluation cycle consistent with ISO 10015, specifically including assessment of whether CPD produced measurable competence development.
ISO 10015 Section 4.4 requires that the effect of training on competence be assessed and documented. A FRAKT Signal Report provides third-party, structured evidence of what attendees intended to do differently as a direct result of a specific CPD session — behavioural intent data demonstrating whether training moved toward the competence change it was intended to produce. This is not satisfaction data or attendance data. It’s the evaluation evidence the standard asks for.
ISO 21001:2018 applies to educational organisations — entities that provide learning activities. Any accredited CPD provider delivering sessions to AEC professionals is, in this sense, an educational organisation with ISO 21001 obligations to demonstrate their learning activities produce the outcomes they claim. A FRAKT Impact Review is an ISO 21001-aligned third-party outcomes assessment — structured evidence that a CPD session produced measurable intent to change professional practice.
“ISO 10015 has required training effectiveness evaluation since 1999. FRAKT is the first practical instrument for AEC CPD that makes compliance achievable. If your organisation holds ISO 9001, you already have the obligation. Here is the tool.”
