ANAB Accreditation
(ISO/IEC 17000:2019 | ANSI/ASTM E2659)
The education of your workforce shouldn’t be about just checking a box on your employee’s personal development plans. If you are investing in your employees, you should put the same amount of diligence into choosing your training provider as you do your manufacturing and supplier partners.
AIM is home to the FIRST and ONLY four programs in the plastic injection molding industry to be accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation (ANAB) Board: based on the ISO/IEC 17000:2019 conformity standard.
- Plastics Technology & Engineering (PTE) Certificate Program
- Molders’ Series
Molding 1, Molding 2, and Molding 3
AIM voluntarily underwent the accreditation process because we recognized that our industry lacked any external certifying body reviewing the available educational programs. There should be someone other than the training provider evaluating its claims of quality on a regular basis to ensure what the provider is saying is true.
As with any mainstream educational institute, this should be done by a high-level, independent regulatory body that is dedicated to this purpose.
[The ANAB assessors have] “found exceptional practice in a number of Elements. Most notable is in the development and scoring of the Performance Assessment. The Assessors were impressed also with the comprehensive approach to continuous improvement and iterative course development.”
So what does all of this mean to you?
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You can be assured of our program’s quality.
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Think of this in ISO terms: An ISO certification lets you know that a manufacturer is holding themselves to a specific set of standards, and you can trust that they will perform at a high level according to those. Our ANAB accreditation is that same mark for our PTE and Molders’ Series programs.
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Your employees are coming out of these programs with measurable improvement in both their knowledge and skills.
- An independent ANAB auditor is scrutinizing our program’s content, and our claims about what the program’s graduates will have the capacity to do after they have completed the program.
The course materials and exams are designed around specific learning outcomes that have been identified by a highly diverse Advisory Board as necessary to effectively perform certain roles within the Injection Molding Industry.- Our unique AIM Learning Model is proven to maximize learning retention.
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You are acknowledging the critical role that your employees play in your development and/or manufacture injection molded products, especially in life- and health-critical industries (medical, automotive, aerospace, military, etc.)
- Accredited training provides evidence that you hold your employee’s skills and knowledge to the same standards as your operations and/or product certifications (ISO/ANSI, ITAR, Nedcap, ASQ, UL, etc.).
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You are demonstrating that your employees’ capabilities matter.
- Especially if you are in a life- or health- critical industry, risk mitigation is important. You should be putting your best foot forward to make sure your employees have the knowledge and skills to execute their roles optimally. Choosing an accredited program shows that you take education seriously, and you are doing everything you can to mitigate your risk of product failure in the field.
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You have access to employee assessment tools.
- We work with employers to develop individualized employee development plans based on current skills, job responsibilities, and future goals. We utilize skill evaluation assessments to evaluate where each potential student should begin and what course(s) will get them to where they need to go.
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Your training provider cares.
- An organization doesn’t sign up for a non-mandatory, highly critical audit process just for the fun of it. We believe that quality matters, and we choose to be scrutinized so that we can assure our customers that we stand behind our word, and also so that we can better ourselves.
[The ANAB assessors have] “found exceptional practice with the job task analysis methodology used to identify critical tasks, (which have) been validated by learners to be of immense benefit. Additionally, the learning methodology incorporating homework and review reinforces learning and ensures retention.”
Advisory Board
AIM utilizes advisory boards comprised of professionals from a wide variety of industry backgrounds, areas of expertise, and organizational profiles. Our advisory boards provides input regarding our industry’s needs and what skills are required to truly be successful.
They also evaluate every learning objective, lesson, and test question in our Molders’ Series and PTE Programs to make sure they are effectively addressing those needs.
We use their feedback to continuously improve upon our programs and our teaching methods. This collaboration is paramount in ensuring that the content we are teaching in our classroom is consistent with what the industry actually needs from their education and training programs.
"AIM has recruited some of the most skilled and influential figures in the Plastic Injection Molding industry. AIM has Advisory Board members representing the plastic injection molding industry in general, representatives from various industries (e.g., automotive, medical, small-scale injection molders), business/management interests, engineers specializing in each of the four courses within the PTE program, students and Alumni.”
