Dear ISIA Members, dear Colleagues and Friends,
the winter already started in the northern regions, and it is time to update you on the activities of ISIA.
2025 ISIA Assembly of the Delegates –7th of April, Vail, USA
The next Assembly of the Delegates will take place in the US; in Vail, beside the Interski General Assembly. The planned date is the 7th of April. ISIA confirms then their commitment to combine meetings with the other International Associations, aiming to have sustainable events, reducing the traveling amount and costs for all the Members.
ISIA Regional Forums 2025
After the first Asian Regional Forum in Japan, last April, the American Region is planning a Regional Forum just after the Interski Congress 2025 in Vail. The Vicepresident America M. Bacer is in charge for the organisation.
The topics of the ISIA Technical Event will be:
- quality standards in exams;
- review of the Safety Test;
- ISIA Technical Test – report of the expert group;
- workbook and documents of the TC.
An attendance of the national experts would be very valuable to ensure the quality of ISIA.
For the next ISIA World Forum, Interski agreed on having an ISIA day during the Congress in Vail 2027.
ISIA Blue Stamp
Following the outcome of the ISIA AD in Livigno, the official format of the Stamp for the Blue Level is now ready and available for the Members that would like to implement it for their Instructors.
Blue Stamp samples:
The nations willing to implement the Stamp are invited to contact the office to obtain the relevant template files. Please note that ISIA will NOT deliver any blue Stamp, that is up to the nations.
We remind you that the Standard approved in Levi, to be eligible for a Blue Level Stamp, is as following:
- Minimum Duration of education: 100 hrs.
- Technical and teaching competence: demonstration and explanation of the basic progression, e.g. for Alpine skiing from introductory activities to basic parallel turns on easy terrain.
- Basic elements and competence about safety in a controlled environment.
Plastic waste management ISIA keynote lecture: first outcomes and survey
The keynote lecture on Plastic Waste Management from Frank Moser that ISIA promoted in Levi 2023, raised the interest of Interski and IAESS. As you likely know already, a Working Group has been formed by the three Organisations and the United Nations BRS Convention Group, that signed a Memorandum of Understanding to continue working together about such topic.
We would like to thank Mr. O’Connell of IASI, that the last 7th of November represented the working Group at the “Regional Forum on Chemicals in Plastics and Global Workshop on Plastic Waste in the Mountains”, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
The Working Group has now delivered a survey on the awareness about the topic that is addressed to all of our members. As all of you know from the lecture in Levi, the topic is crucial for the health of the Mountain Environment, then also for the future of our sports.
Therefore, we kindly ask you to fill in the survey at the following link and to spread it among your Members:
QF survey follow-up
During the June AD in Livigno, the concept of a Qualification Framework was presented in the context of the development of the ISIA Quality Standard. The 20 nations present at the meeting expressed their insights in a survey on the presence and functioning of qualification frameworks in their countries. Representatives of the ISIA members who were unable to attend the DA are invited to read a short presentation (PDF attached) and to answer a few questions in the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/8z4FFAL3NbUBfYR68
We hope that at the April DA in Vail, CO, we will have a chance to present you with a complete mapping of the national qualifications frameworks among all 39 ISIA member nations.
Work of the Technical Commission
The activities of the TC already started on the 9th of November in Sölden, with the control of the Lithuanian Observer LSIA. An inspection of the ISIA Technical Test run by BASI / Swiss Snowsports took also place the 29th of November.
At their last meeting, the Technical Commission discussed the inspections planned for this winter. All members were contacted and asked to send the dates of their highest qualification courses and of the technical tests to the ISIA office. All planned technical tests will be published in the ISIA calendar.
We want to renew the invitation to all the Members to nominate experts that would attend the Working Group dedicated to overwork the ISIA Safety Test and the expert group for the discussion about the ISIA Technical Test, as requested in Livigno.
Value of the ISIA Card and Stamp in the ski resorts.
We would like to thank our Finnish Member FNASI for their work raising awareness about ISIA in the Finnish resorts. Here the words of the FNASI President Nelli Heiskanen: “We have contacted 20 (the biggest ones among these) ski resorts in Finland so far and all of them said yes to either a 50 % discount or even a free ski pass with ISIA Stamp (so not Card only but Stamp too)! We decided to contact each resort’s management directly and personally, which seems to have been the right decision – slower than a generic email but certainly a better result! I think we’re slowly making ISIA bigger in Finland!”
The value and importance of professional ski instructors in the ski resorts is an important point that ISIA wants to strengthen. ISIA will implement a subdomain of the ISIA webpage that will list all the discounts available worldwide for the Snowsports professional affiliated to ISIA. This will offer the ski resorts a standardised platform to reach ski instructors worldwide and to show them the special ski ticket prices for ski instructors The subdomain will be www.skitickets.isia.ski. We would like to thank our German Member, the DSLV, that already created a service for their Members, and will made possible to extend that to all of our Members, opening the existing platform to ISIA.
ISIA Digital Card
The development of an ISIA Digital Card is on its way. The Digital Card Provider Cardu, in cooperation with the provider of the ISIA DB, is now testing the solution in a protected environment. As soon as the tests are terminated, Cardu will start delivering the first set of Cards to a limited number of Nations that have requested to take part in the project. The Nations involved will be contacted directly as soon as the test phase would be finished.
Data maintenance of the ISIA DB
We remind you that it is crucial that the instructors are properly registered and UpToDate in the ISIA database, for several reasons. First, the shift from physical to digital card will rely exclusively on the info in the ISIA DB: there will be no ISIA Card with no proper data.
The ISIA Office started identifying the non-compliances in the DB and will communicate to the Members the situations that need to be sorted. The problem of duplicates in the DB will be solved, previous notification to the Member nations that registered them. We point out that while an instructor can have several qualifications, acquired within different Member Nations, the personal ISIA Code must be unique and it has always to remain the same. Only the oldest ISIA Code of the duplicated instructors will be considered as the valid one.
It is worth mentioning that one of the next steps of the DB development is going to be the release of an API, to be delivered to all the nations, that will allow connecting the national DBs directly to the ISIA DB, making the update process much easier.
ISIA Pins and Badges order
The Office has received several requests from individual instructors, asking to receive their pin and soft badge. We highlight that the ISIA Office cannot deal with individual requests. Since the stock of pins and badges is now empty, the Office will now proceed to reorder them.
We kindly ask you to notify the office by the end of December if you need such items and how many.
Please do not hesitate to contact us in case you need any further information, on the topics above or other subjects.
We wish you all the best for your activities in the upcoming season.
Thank you and best regards.
Dr. Vittorio Caffi Dr. Valentin Kiedaisch
President Vicepresident Europe