Besides the national accreditation bodies of the South East Europe region (SEE NABs), Barbara Pflugbeil and Andreas Hönnerscheid from DAkkS, Germany, and Maria Papatzikou from Greece presented the experiences of their accreditation bodies, the workshop was moderated by Rózsa Ring. 20 participants from the 6 SEE NABs attended the virtual workshop, representing the internal staff of the national accreditation bodies.
The presentation and the discussion on establishment of competence criteria for each accreditation scheme showed that the national accreditation bodies defined the competence criteria in quite a harmonized way although there were some differences in the depth of defining the technical requirements. Despite the differencies, the discussion confirmed that the technical scopes of the assessors and experts are qualified in the required detail.
The presentations and the discussion on the effective methods to demonstrate competence of accreditation body personnel showed that the NABs evaluation methods were quite similar although again there were some differences like who conducts the evaluation especially qualifying the technical competence of assessors/experts. It was concluded during the workshop that there were slightly different ways of implementing the competence criteria and management, but all fulfilled the requirements of clause 6.1 of ISO/IEC 17011:2017.
In the very lively discussion, the participants discussed several interesting issues and from the practices of the other NABs they got some good ideas to consider when improving their competence management activities.
The feedback of the participants was very positive, they found the virtual workshop useful to harmonize their the accreditation activities and confirmed the need of further virtual exchange of experience meetings.
