lindsayre wrote:What would it take to "certify" our clerks and others responsible for record-keeping? How could we be certain they know their responsibilities and can complete their assignments? Would they have to complete some training? Pass a test? Serve for x number of years? Submit all reports on time for x number of months? Complete three consecutive clean financial audits?
I'm slightly confused what clerks you are referring to. I'm guessing you're referring to ward clerks, but just to clarify, are you talking about "certifying" church employees or ward clerks? I definitely see the merit of some sort of certification process for ward clerks, but I don't see how it can be required. What happens if someone doesn't pass? Are they released?
I don't have the years of experience most clerks commenting on this forum have, but I have trained something on the order of 15 new ward clerks in the last year (we have very high turnover). With turnover like that, I can't spend more than a couple weeks with the new clerks. Here is what I've found.
The online training is adequate for getting them started, but fails to prove useful when problems are encountered. It would be helpful to have some trouble-shooting presentations up there as well. However, in all reality, there is so much information for a new clerk to pick up on that trying to give it to them all up front would be overload. I have found that it is better to wait for them to encounter the task/problem/etc and then they are receptive to being trained on that item. It sticks better.
Because of the high turnover, there are certain things I think are crucial that all clerks know as soon as possible. That is what I focus my training on. These items are 1) processing donations 2) preparing reimbursements 3) reconciling CUFS and 4) count sacrament attendance. That is probably a short list for most of you, but if they are still around when something else comes up (NSF checks, missionary payments, quarterly reports, annual history, tithing settlement, entering budgets) then they get trained on that as well.
So back to how to certify. Best I think would be to identify some critical items that absolutely must be understood within the first couple weeks of being a clerk. There is an endless number of potential problems that could occur. I think those need to be dealt with as they are encountered and shouldn't be part of a certification process. All you would want to make sure is that the clerk knows where to go for help when he is stuck.
As a side note, I think it is important that those resources be easily accessible/approachable or the clerk is likely to flail around blindly trying to fix it on his own.
There is also an entire membership side of their duties. Luckily, we have very few ordinations, and the ones we do have we work directly with the clerk to make sure it is entered correctly. Organization info - if they were using it, they continue to use it. If not, then they don't. We don't train on it unless they want to. As we all know, nothing gets you in contact with CHQ quicker than messing up on the finances. I've never gotten a call because soneone's calling wasn't entered correctly in MLS.
If we are really going to get picky on who can be a clerk, perhaps best would be to provide instructions to a bishop of what skills are required for someone to be called as a clerk. But wait, who's training bishops?