Valuers' national professional qualification system in Estonia: development and perspectives

The paper aims to tackle the importance of lifelong learning process on the example of valuers profession in Estonia. As far it is known to the authors of this paper, similar kind of research approach has not been used in academic papers so far, filling in the research gap in this way both in valuation profession literature and also in educational science in general. On the other hand, there is also hypothesized that the lifelong learning plays quite a crucial role also in the survival of the national professional qualification system of authorized valuers.For the sustainability of the national valuers profession, it is important to build up on a country level a quality-based professional qualification system. The quality of the valuers profession in Estonia lies on three main pillars: • the valuers base-education and self-training, • the national professional qualification system, and • supervision system, based on periodic reporting of valuers professional activity and periodic auditing on valuers workplace.The research is based on the whole population of valuers in Estonia. Both qualitative and quantitative data are used within the research, gathered via the Estonian Association of Appraisers (EAA) since 2004 up to present. Database contains three layers of data: (1) data from the valuers professional authorization exam protocols, (2) data from the valuers periodical auditing reports and (3) data from the valuers yearly professional activity reports, which are aggregated in MS-Excel. All the gathered data are personalized, where the name of the valuer is taken as dependent variable.The paper concludes that in Estonia, the sustainability of the valuers national professional qualification system as a whole is under pressure, as the overall costs to keep up the valuation qualification system is very high, compared to the other qualification systems and there is a need to find out a way, how to run the system in a more cost-effective way. Also, from many of the valuers, there is a pressure to lower the overall level of requirements of the valuers authorization exams.There is also a general problem that some of the authorized valuers have been moved to work for commercial banks, where they belong under the jurisdiction and supervision of the Financial Supervision Authority in Estonia, but not under the supervision of EAA, creating overall unfair treatment among authorized valuers and making the meaning of the whole supervision system questionable.