Explaining Professional Expertise in Strength and Conditioning: An IUSCA Position Statement on the International Qualification Framework (IQF) Level Descriptors

Abstract

The International Qualification Framework (IQF) was introduced to provide a standardised and internationally relevant structure for aligning certifications, qualifications, and professional standards within strength and conditioning (S&C). This position statement further defines the eight IQF levels through explicit descriptors of professional reasoning, judgement, autonomy, complexity management, and error correction. The framework adopts a realist and critical rationalist institutional position. S&C practice is understood as explanatory problem-solving directed at real physical systems, with progress occurring through conjecture, empirical scrutiny, criticism, and the continual identification and correction of error. The descriptors were developed through a two-stage expert consultation comprising an exploratory first stage and a wider second-stage review in which the draft descriptors were refined and pressure-tested. The consultation was intended to ground and scrutinise the descriptors in professional experience and was not designed as a formal consensus or psychometric exercise. The descriptors describe progression from externally guided rule-following, through increasingly conditional and principle-based practice, to scientific, system-level, and field-shaping judgement. The position statement also develops an account of practitioner expertise as physically instantiated knowledge, including knowledge that may not yet be fully articulated, while retaining the requirement that professional judgement remains open to scrutiny and improvement. The resulting framework has implications for education, certification, assessment, employment, research, evidence-based practice, open science, professional governance, and the role of universities. The descriptors are presented as theoretically derived conclusions from the IUSCA’s institutional position rather than as empirically discovered categories, and remain provisional, criticisable, and open to revision where better explanations or identified problems warrant change.