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How RPF records a body's recognition of a role, makes that backing visible as a badge, and produces a credential template an issuer can sign.
A recognition adds one fact to a role, profile or flow: that a named professional or sector body backs it as meeting its standard. RPF records that fact, shows it to everyone who views the role, and produces a credential template — a description of the credential in a standard format — for a downstream issuer to use.
This section is for the RPF administrators who record recognitions, the recognising bodies whose recognition is recorded, the issuers who turn templates into real credentials, and the practitioners reading the role pages.
A plain fact attached to a role, profile or flow.
RPF describes how professional work is changing: roles (a job, defined by what it must be able to do), the competence profiles within a role, the competence items those profiles are built from, the information uses they touch, and the flows that connect roles across a transformation. A recognition adds one more fact to a role, profile or flow: that a named professional or sector body recognises it.
Recognition answers a question every audience asks of a role — "where does this lead?". A role is more than RPF's own description of a job when a professional association, an industry body or a registration board stands behind it. RPF makes that backing visible (a badge on the role) and portable (a credential template a downstream issuer can issue from).
Accreditation and certification is a chain of distinct roles done by distinct parties. RPF is the framework layer at the start of the chain.
The full diagram of how RPF relates to accreditation bodies, certification bodies, assessors, registrars, regulators, professional associations, employers and credential platforms lives in the Framework help section. The short version: RPF defines and publishes the roles, profiles and flows the others reference; it is none of those other actors.
Recognition is a focused feature with a clear boundary. Reading what RPF does and does not do is the fastest way to understand what it means.
Recognition joins two lifecycles — the role's own, and the recognition's. The public effects (badge, metro signal, downloadable template) appear only when both have completed.
Each journey names an actor, their goal and what they see. Pick the one that matches your job.
How an RPF administrator records, in RPF, that a body recognises a set of roles, profiles or flows.
What a practitioner sees on a role page when a body recognises it, and how recognition differs from verification.
How a credential issuer downloads a credential template and turns it into a real, signed credential.
How recognition is scoped to a market or worldwide, and how the metro map signals recognition coverage.
Short, plain definitions for the terms used across the recognition surfaces.
