FBTM Big

The FacilitationBench™ Curriculum is designed to give students the materials, tools, and resources they need to successfully manage interactions within an organization.  Group dynamics can be difficult when important business decisions need to be made. Facilitators interact with groups that need to work together as a team to reach a goal. Facilitation skills are necessary to work with groups, business teams, leaders, vendors, and stakeholders; these groups often have different perspectives, cultures and backgrounds and thus different viewpoints, which can make it difficult to reach an agreement. A facilitator manages the communication process to achieve an end goal, while remaining neutral throughout the process. Upon successful completion of all courselets, labs, and exam, student is awarded a Facilitation Professional™ Certificate.

Job Description

A Facilitation Professional™ works to guide productive interactions between groups and employees. These interactions can be as traditional as a meeting between employees, or as overarching as a strategic meeting between business leaders, stakeholders, and vendors. The main goal of the facilitator is to ensure that these meetings are as successful as possible, while promoting employee involvement and minimizing disagreements. The facilitator helps smooth over the meeting process by ensuring that group members don’t get stuck by something, whether it’s a disagreement or non-participation. The Facilitation Professional™ continuously works with company leadership to improve workplace interactions.

Curriculum Purpose

The purpose of the FacilitationBench™ Curriculum is to provide a set of guidelines that individuals such as team leaders and managers within organizations, youth and community workers, and those working with partners and external stakeholders can use to facilitate agreements, handle conflict and confrontation, and manage groups during meetings and activities.

Curriculum Scope

The learning outcomes of the FacilitationBench™ curriculum are designed to provide students with the resources they need to successfully engage in facilitation. The curriculum is designed to address group facilitation, participatory event planning, facilitation of agreements, conflict resolution, and working to eliminate problem behaviors and increase productivity. Following a series of introductory courselets that provide the individual with a set of core business and communication skills, the courselets address what skills and personal qualities facilitators should possess; how they should use those skills to plan and design meetings, discussions, and group activities; facilitating agreements; managing conflict and dealing with disruptions.

Prerequisites

ProficiencyBench™ courslets:

  1. Setting and Achieving Goals
  2. Adjusting to the Workplace
  3. Making Decisions and Solving Problems
  4. Managing Stress
  5. Managing Time
  6. Writing Effectively
  7. Displaying Ethical Behaviors
  8. Communicating in Meetings
  9. Leading Group Meetings
  10. Working on Teams
  11. Networking with Professionals
  12. Creating and Delivering Presentations

These courselets can be taken as part of the ProficiencyBench Curriculum or as CEUs

Certificate requisites

Academic: To fulfill the academic requirements of the curriculum, students must complete the curriculum with all courselets and satisfatorily complete seven lab assignments. Lab assignments are designed to assess student understanding of specific learning outcomes of the FacilitationBench™ curriculum.

Certificate issuance: To be issued a certificate identifying you as a Facilitation Professional™, a student must complete all the academic requirements and pass an assessment in the form of a comprehensive Facilitation Professional™ exam.

Certificate maintenance and use:

Designations and acronyms appointed to certificate holders are identified on the certificate and the individual profiles in the alumni directory. Each certificate has a unique serial number which is tracked by the CBA Education Administrator.

Obtained designation and associated acronyms can be used to signify that the individual has obtained and maintains a valid certificate in the area of Facilitation. The designation and acronym Facilitation Professional™ (FP) can be used in CVs, on business cards and websites by the certificate holder only. Certificate is not transferrable to another person or company. The designation and acronym can only be used while the certificate is valid. When certificate is invalidated for any reason, the person can no longer use the designation and acronym.

Certificate term of validity is two years. In order to maintain the certificate, a student must obtain 20 PDUs or 2 CEUs (20 hours of continuing education) over a 24 month period. If the student fails to acquire sufficient continuing education, the certificate is invalidated.

Completion requirements

Study course materials

Pass all knowledge checks, labs and exams

Certificate

Student will receive Certificate of Completion upon completing the academic requirements of the FacilitationBench Curriculum. Student will also be Awarded a certificate upon completing the Facilitation Professional™ exam. Certificates are available for download upon completion.

Designation and Acronym Granted

“Facilitation Professional”™ - FP

Technical Requirements

For hardware, we recommend a dual-core CPU with at least 2G of memory. We recommend any operating system capable of running the latest versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 5.x and later. For browser, We recommend running either Mozilla Firefox 5.x and later or Chrome. Why? Both browsers provide excellent support for web real-time communications (WebRTC). Safari 5.x and later, Internet Explorer 10.x and later, and Microsoft Edge will work as well, but Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 5.x and later will deliver better audio in lower bandwidth conditions.

Information Regarding Changes to the Certificate Program

The Center for Business Acceleration will strive to deliver its courselets and curriculums in accordance with the descriptions provided on the CBA website at the time of enrollment. However, in some situations it might be beneficial or necessary for the CBA to implement changes to courselets or curriculums. The changes will not be very substantial so as to have impact on students who have already started their courselet or curriculum. In some circumstances where it is necessary for the CBA to implement such changes after enrollment due to developments in the relevant subject, advances in teaching or evaluation practice, or requirements of accreditation processes, students will be notified of the changes made to courselets or curriculum immediately.