curriculum | National Inventory Certification Association

27 May 2021

Inventory 101

Curriculum One of the courses required to achieve your Certified Inventory Specialist designation is Inventory 101. The purpose of this course is to help inventory professionals learn about the various inventory categories so you are prepared to speak knowledgeably with others in the “counting industry.” This knowledge will also enable you to know whether to consider a job opportunity or to decline.

Personal property inventory is fairly new compared to retail and manufacturing, so you will most likely be contacted to inventory a retail store. Especially at year-end, numerous convenience store owners or managers will be calling to find someone to count their bubble gum, candy bars, and other consumables in their store. Small manufacturers and sheet metal shops might call on you to count their “pieces and parts” at year-end.

Knowing the key words and types of items other industries inventory will help you know what opportunities to accept and which ones to pass on or refer if you know of someone who specializes in that industry. These calls give you an opportunity to ask if they have an inventory of their equipment, furniture, electronics, etc. Give a quick explanation of why it is important to have this inventory, and you might secure a personal property inventory client!

13 Feb 2019

2019 Curriculum Additions Announced

A big THANK YOU to all members who took the time to complete our brief survey in January regarding your preferences of new curriculum to develop.

Since NICA is a member-driven association, knowing what interests you have, and what information you are seeking, helps us develop the curriculum that you – our members – want.

Each year, after we receive your responses, we tabulate and list the courses in order of most votes. We then seek qualified people to develop the content for these courses.

The results and the two courses we will offer in 2019 are:

Marketing & Sales Techniques for Home Inventory Services
Structure Inventories

If you have qualifications to write and a desire to contribute for either of these topics, please contact our office.

03 Aug 2016

Curriculum Survey Results

The final survey is now closed, and we’re already making plans based on the results of the Curriculum Survey results. We believe that education is the most important area to place our focus, and is really the foundation of why NICA was developed.

Based on one of the surveys, you believe that continuing education is the most important function that we provide.

The Curriculum Survey will guide us as we plan for upcoming courses. As you know, Project Management was recently released. Due to your responses, the course that received the most votes has already been contracted to be released early-mid 4th quarter; that course is Collections Inventories. The full results are below:

Industry-related courses ranked by number of votes

Collections inventories was the only course that received a 100%. That means every person who responded to the survey chose this course.
Next in line is Insurance Basics for the Inventory Professional.
We had a tie for third place, shared by Basic Bookkeeping for a Home Inventory Business, Understanding the Difference between Public Adjusters and Insurance Adjusters
Loss Inventories was ranked next on the list.
Another tie for the final three courses are Commercial Inventories, How to Start a Home Inventory Business, and Quoting and Establishing Price Points.

Non-industry-related courses ranked by number of votes

This category did not receive near the number of votes as industry-related courses accumulated. To report the results, though, we list them below, in order of preference.

Sales Techniques
Establishing and Sticking to a Budget
Branding and Creating a Busiiness Image
Developing Marketing Campaigns

The results showed an overwhelming preference for industry-related curriculum, so this is where we will focus our continuing education courses for 2017.

Again, we thank you for your time and responses.

22 Jun 2016

Curriculum Survey

We are so appreciative to all members and also professionals in the industry who are not members for responding to our surveys. Your input is very important to us. The board will review all the tabulated results and will use this information for our 2017 planning session. Knowing what you want from your industry education association will help us provide more of what you want, and less of what is not of as much importance.

This Curriculum Survey will be the final survey for quite a while. We’ve accumulated enough information to move forward with your preferences in mind. We thank you for giving us your opinion in the previous surveys, and thank you in advance for taking the time to give us your input once again.

Curriculum includes a good mix of topics

The April survey informed us that you are happy with the mix of topics we offer. And now that we have achieved a good balance of industry- and non-industry-related courses, we will continue to strive to provide two new courses per year. To meet your needs, we want to know your interests. Growing our curriculum is essential so you can maintain your CIS designation. We want to ensure that we provide topics of interest so you can meet the 5 CEU annual requirement of continuing education.

Project Management was our first course released this year, responding to this request in the 2015 survey, two additional courses are currently in the initial planning stage, both also suggested in the 2015 survey.

Curriculum survey will help determine future courses

Your responses to this Curriculum Survey will help us plan future courses. Here is the link to the Curriculum Survey. It should take only about a minute of your time. Results will be reported in our July newsletter and also here on the website.