We are pleased to notify all agents in the PIER network about some exciting and important new updates.
PIER has always sought to represent our global network of education agents as the most reliable, trusted community of trained and dedicated professionals. Over the last 15 years, we have worked on building an awareness of education agents and advocating with government and industry bodies on the importance of trained, qualified education agents in international education.
The last few years have seen a large growth in the number of trained professionals, with 2020 being our biggest year to date. While this is a fantastic result, with growth, unfortunately, comes an increase in fraudulent or criminal behaviour and unethical practices. In the coming weeks, we will release two new features that will help decrease such problematic practices and strengthen the legitimacy of your qualifications.
First, each agent will be given a unique, verified URL for their certification that is hosted by PIER. This means that all certifications you have attained will be accessible entirely online. The existing PDF certificate, and physical paper copies of certifications will no longer be the primary method of showing your qualification. Instead, you can share your qualifications with your unique, verified URL. This feature will help prevent the creation of any falsified documents to be passed off as authentic.
Second, all agents and agencies will have their own unique ID in our PIER Network. This means that you will have a unique ID which will link back to a verified profile hosted on the PIER Network. You will be able to give your ID to an education provider or potential student and they can use this to verify your credentials. This feature means any fraudulent, unethical or criminal behaviour by any agent listed on the PIER network can now be updated on their profile in real-time.
We are confident that these two features will strengthen the authenticity of your qualification, and will boost the confidence of education providers and students in knowing that the agents they work with are qualified. We also encourage agents to call out poor behaviour that impacts on the integrity of the education agent industry as a whole.