HUMAN RESOURCES
Winning formula AMPAP administrator Pierre Coutu, reflects on the launch, history and success of ACI-ICAO’s flagship airport management training programme.
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he Airport Management Professional Accreditation Programme (AMPAP) is a joint ACI-ICAO initiative that offers a unique executive development curriculum to airport management professionals and stakeholders. The programme covers all the functional areas of the airport business, promotes adherence to uniform industry standards and best-recommended practices, and engenders a broad cross-cultural learning environment. Graduates receive the joint ACI-ICAO award of the International Airport Professional (IAP) or AMPAP Associate diploma and designation. We recently passed the 13th anniversary of our 2007 pilot course at ICAO Headquarters, and I fondly remember those first 18 eager individuals who arrived from seven different countries spread across four continents. That first group had already accurately signified a cross-section of the growing AMPAP community that is located today in 115 countries worldwide. AMPAP courses focus on best practices in airport management along with ICAO standards and recommended practices, and policy guidance. Experienced, multi-disciplinary subject-matter experts with extensive international expertise, including AMPAP graduates, have conducted the gateway/entry mandatory courses in a classroom/face-to-face format over five days in about 60 cities worldwide to date, multiple times in the some of these cities. The three other mandatory courses in the AMPAP curriculum have always been delivered in an interactive, combined virtual classroom and online format since 2007, requiring no travel displacements.
International interactive online learning component Close to one hundred resource-persons have contributed to the development, updates, and delivery of AMPAP since our inception and we all feel privileged to have had an opportunity to contribute to this venture.
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AIRPORT WORLD/ISSUE 5, 2020
Those of us involved know it is comparable to a team sport in terms of how important it is to maintain our momentum and stay focused. By these very tenets, in response to the challenges that arose from the COVID-19 spread, we instituted extraordinary measures that would allow eligible applicants who wanted to begin their own AMPAP journey to gain entry via any one of the online mandatory courses, when normally, new enrollees must start with the ‘gateway’ course that is delivered face-to-face only. Since we launched the programme, the strength, quality and interactive design of the AMPAP online delivery platform has been tailored to the learning requirements of management-level personnel and it is this robust online feature we have employed that we are fervently counting on to continue today. This agile response would effectively allow airport executives to stay safe while pursuing their competency building aspirations during these unprecedented, challenging times.
Exceptional quality professionals breaking down functional professional silos Over time, and from interfacing first-hand with the professionals who engage in AMPAP, one common element that continues to stand out among them is their exceptional quality. Consequentially, by allowing the programme to build on these foundational management personnel and augment the skillsets of the more experienced, their professional enhancement makes for better quality decision-making and actions that put them ahead of the game and stand them out among peers, locally, regionally and globally. They work to provide improved added value together. The AMPAP experience has revealed that functional silos, such as the departmentalisation of airport managerial structures into
