for helping them find better futures. At the time that she joined WES, the organisation had just undergone multiple leadership changes, and its future was uncertain. Shortly thereafter, the board of trustees asked Assefa to step in as interim Executive Director, and she eventually took on the permanent role. Recognising that there was significant demand for WES’s credential evaluation product but a lack of organisational capacity to meet this demand, Assefa led the development of a new, more efficient process: rather than working through intermediaries such as universities, WES would directly connect with the individuals who needed their services. This change improved the delivery and quality of the credential evaluation product and expanded its reach. Assefa then worked to ensure that WES’s credential reports would be accepted by educational institutions, employers, licensing bodies, and government agencies, thereby establishing WES as a global expert on credential evaluation and international education. This required significant internal capacity building as well as strong external outreach and communications. WES invested in training its employees on how to stay up to date on various education systems around the world and also launched a newsletter, World Education News & Reviews, still published today. The newsletter illustrated the depth of research that WES undertook to conduct its evaluations and educated client institutions about different education systems around the world. Assefa also set out to find other ways to get WES on the map and ensure that its unique evaluation product was accepted both by those that needed it and by institutions that received it, such as universities and employers.
“Knowledge sharing was part and parcel of our growth strategy. In order to reach universities in the early days, we had to overcome their scepticism. They said, you’re not based on campus, what is your knowledge base? What do you know? So we decided that the best way to do this was to become active in the field and to also show them what we can do by publishing and sharing our expertise. And we never stopped doing that. It was very important for WES to be active as a thought leader because we felt it was our responsibility to make sure that credentials were evaluated properly, not only by us but by others as well, and that there was wide understanding of what that meant.” Mariam Assefa, former Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Building on this early work, Assefa continued to solidify WES’s position as a leader in the international education space throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to growing WES’s core credential evaluation product, she developed the organisation’s board of trustees and built a strong network of relationships in the field. Drawing on this expertise, in 1998, WES launched its Automatic International Credential Evaluation System (AICES), a proprietary database that housed details about the content of educational qualifications around the world. By creating a continually expanding database from which WES could draw when evaluating credentials, AICES significantly accelerated the evaluation process and laid a foundation for scaling the operation beyond the US in the early 2000s (see Exhibit A). “We had been going through the process of innovation through technology to make the evaluation process smoother, and always keeping quality as a decisive factor. There is a lot of risk with credential evaluation that if you compromise quality, you challenge your integrity. That was one of the reasons why WES became the leader in credential evaluation in the United States, because we were faster on the one hand, and at the same time, we were still providing a quality product.” Hans de Wit, former Chair, Board of Trustees
3
Powered by FlippingBook