The Academy for International Relations offers learning and development activities to help all BZ staff and central government employees with an international role continually develop their expertise and professional skills. Departments with specific learning requirements can contact the Academy for advice, learning activities and information.
Why a framework of reference?
The Academy has three distinct roles:
- We develop and offer a varied and topical range of learning activities.
- We offer in-person and online platforms for staff to exchange knowledge and strengthen their networks.
- We aim to be the compass guiding our ministry’s development towards becoming a learning organisation.
This means we have to clearly define our role and activities, to ensure we deliver a consistent level of quality. That’s why we use a framework of reference when considering requests to develop or procure new learning activities.
Using the framework to uniformly assess learning needs and requests
The framework of reference is a tool that enables us to uniformly assess new learning needs and requests as they arise, and to manage the existing activities in our curriculum. It also helps us to better explain considerations regarding our role and working methods. Each request is considered in light of the following:
- The learning activity must serve a clear need.
- The learning activity must be intended for a ministry-wide target group, in terms of both numbers and diversity.
- The learning activity will be run multiple times.
- In the development of the learning activity, a BZ department must be involved as content owner.
- There must be sufficient capacity, time and budget.
Reference criteria
The activity:
- is part of BZ’s organisational development agenda or human resources policy;
- serves the strategic or organisational interests of central government, BZ or the relevant directorate-general;
- supports the primary tasks of a directorate-general (i.e. multiple departments);
- fills a gap in specific (or basic) knowledge that has BZ-wide relevance;
- increases staff’s familiarity with a work field that has BZ-wide relevance;
- meets a high level of demand across the organisation;
- teaches a new (BZ-specific) work procedure or method;
- covers basic knowledge and skills of diplomacy;
- helps promote interministerial cooperation.
The activity:
- does not relate to international services or BZ’s corporate activities;
- has a limited target group (it is intended for only one division or department);
- is open to only a relatively small number of participants (max. 10) per year;
- is not a sustainable proposition because the activity will be run only once;
- has no content owner.
More information
If you have any questions or need more information, please contact the Academy.