The first results of guide certification in Moscow — through the eyes of the participants in the process. We examine the procedure and the examiners' impressions.
International experience and local freestyle
On 20 April 2021 a new Federal Law No 93 was signed, which changed the rules of tourist activity in the Russian Federation. The main change introduced is that from 1 July 2022, in order to conduct city tours, a guide must undergo a certification procedure and pass a special competency exam. Without certification, it will be impossible to conduct tours and there will be fines. Let’s take a look at the procedure and the first results of the system.
The idea of testing the knowledge of tourist guides, whose routes are not limited to museum halls but include streets and public squares, can hardly be called innovative. Such a system has been used in many countries for decades. French guides study for about a year before taking the exam, while in Italy there is separate accreditation for each region. Since Moscow and some other cities have been experiencing a real excursion boom for the last 10-15 years, the relevance of this issue for domestic tourism is undeniable.
I think that certification should be compulsory. After all, we are the face of our city, the capital of Russia, for visitors from other regions and countries. This means that the story of the tour should be reliable, based on information from reliable sources, not from the Internet. Even the way they answer exam questions, the turns of phrase and the terms they use will immediately reveal the source of the information used by the guide.
Tour guide, author of more than 45 excursions in Moscow, the winner of the All-Russia Competition of Tourism Workers — 2022 in the nomination «The Best Tour Guide in Russia».
The introduction of compulsory certification has been under discussion in Russia for a long time. Until 2022, anyone could give a tour, but in general the certification procedure was voluntary. On the one hand, this gave carte blanche to talented newcomers with no specialist knowledge — that’s how the bright projects of auteur excursions were born.
At the same time, there was no mechanism to control the quality of the excursion services; there were many stories among the guides of tall tales told to tourists from China, as well as of reading out a famous internet encyclopedia on the excursion. It was assumed that market mechanisms would regulate the situation, and bad guides would lose their audience and their income.
The fuss about certification
It is quite difficult for an ordinary tourist to verify a guide’s knowledge and experience. That’s why for several years there has been a debate within the profession about how to assess guides.
The professional community was divided: some actively supported the introduction of compulsory certification, some strongly opposed it, and others watched the conflict unfold. Those in favour of certification argued that it was necessary to have a basic knowledge of the city or region in which one worked, while those against it appealed to the amazing variety of itineraries. Should a specialist in railway history know all the spires of the Moscow Kremlin?
The debate is still going on, and its most ardent participants are not backing down from their positions. However, the federal law has been passed and the new reality is as follows.
The real story
Firstly, the introduction of mandatory attestation has been very humane in terms of timing. Although certification will be mandatory from 1 July 2022, a transitional period of one year was immediately introduced, during which no penalties or fines were expected for failure to certify. About a month ago, the transition period was extended to 1 July 2024.
Given the vast size and diversity of the country’s cultural heritage, certification in Russia takes place at the regional level. This means that a guide passes the exam in a particular constituent entity of the federation and is given the right to conduct tours within its borders. It is impossible to be an equally competent guide in Kamchatka and Dagestan at the same time. But what about the authors of long tours that cover several regions? They can be certified in several subjects at once, having passed the exam once.
Who can become a guide? You must be an adult citizen of the Russian Federation with secondary vocational or higher education in any field. An applicant may also be certified if he/she has the necessary skills to conduct excursions (at least in theory), either through training or practical experience. At least one of the three conditions must be met:
- Completed higher education that includes a model in the field of tour services;
- Additional professional training in tour guiding (usually a 4-5 month course);
- have at least 5 years' experience as a tour guide or interpreter. Confirmation is provided by contracts with travel companies, tax documents, client testimonials.
The last option is for those who have found themselves in a flourishing garden of Moscow cognitive leisure and have now decided to legitimise their relationship with the excursion sphere.
If you meet the above criteria, you can apply. In Moscow, the whole process is transferred as much as possible to the online format, there is no need to go anywhere. The platform for the procedure is the mos.ru portal, where it is necessary to register and fill in profile data. Then you can upload scans of the required documents and a photograph.
The documents are then submitted to the Moscow Tourism Committee staff for verification. The verification is done manually, but it does not take more than three working days.
Practical use
According to the law, the exam consists of two parts — a test part and a practical part (the best analogy is probably the traffic police exam). The date and time of each part of the exam can be selected in the personal cabinet.
A special question bank has been developed for the test section of the 2022 exam. Each question has four possible answers, only one of which is correct. You can familiarise yourself with the list of questions in advance, they are publicly available in the Tourism Committee section on mos.ru.
The test will be available at the time chosen by the applicant. The computer selects 30 questions at random. The test lasts 2 hours, and to pass it you must not make more than 7 mistakes.
And there is a bonus: if the applicant has provided proof of at least three years' work experience at the time of uploading the documents, it is not necessary to take the test section.
Almost a student exam
The next stage is the practical task. Again, questions are prepared in the form of possible excursion topics. There are 30 of them, divided into three blocks — architectural and urban routes, local-territorial and historical-cultural — each with 10 variants.
On the day and at the time chosen, the applicant joins an online conference in which he/she is joined by the members of the Certification Commission: members of the Tourism Committee, representatives of professional and public organisations and museum staff.
In many regions and countries, it is compulsory for tour guides to attend the exam in person. But I think that the remote format chosen in Moscow is optimal and more convenient, a person can avoid taking time off work or, for example, prepare for the certification during the summer holidays at the dacha. The Moscow procedure is optimal and convenient for all participants. All of us in the committee are adults and experienced people, so we can easily detect attempts to cheat or look up the answer to a question, even when conducting a practical task from a distance.
Tour guide, author of more than 45 tours in Moscow, the winner of the All-Russia Competition of Tourism Workers — 2022 in the nomination «The Best Tour Guide in Russia».
After a few words about yourself, the applicant selects a questionnaire. Each questionnaire contains three questions, one each from the blocks of architecture, territorial excursions and thematic routes. You have to choose one of the three questions. For example, the ticket may contain
- «Myasnitskaya and its surroundings»;
- «Avant-garde architecture of Moscow’s appearance»;
- «Literary Moscow».
The author of a walk about Bulgakov will prefer the last question, and the expert on early Soviet architecture will prefer the penultimate one. The possibility of choosing a question eliminates difficulties for authors of unusual walks. For example, a connoisseur of architecture should still be familiar with different styles and periods.
You will then have a few minutes to prepare, and then you will have to briefly describe the route of a possible excursion on the theme and answer any additional questions from the members of the Commission.
If the applicant has applied for certification as a guide-interpreter, part of the story should be in a foreign language. And if the applicant has applied for certification in more than one region at the same time, the examiners are joined by a member of the Commission from each of the relevant fields and each of them asks a question about their region. This is followed by the Commission’s decision (pass or fail), which is taken by majority vote in an open ballot.
If the candidate has passed the exam, they must pay the state tax and wait a few days while the documents are prepared: the identity card and the certificate. The data on passing the procedure are entered into a special state register, and the badge has a special QR code on which it is possible to check its authenticity. The accreditation is valid for five years.
First steps of certification
The accreditation process was launched in Moscow at the end of May. Considering the number of practicing guides in Moscow (usually 3,000 people), it was feared that not everyone would be able to pass the exam by the target date of 1 July. So the decision to postpone the introduction of fines for a year proved to be very appropriate. It made it possible to avoid queues, and everything is running smoothly.
The certificate is useful for all categories of guides. As a rule, even a practising guide regularly leads 5-10 different tours. Preparing for the certification allows you to refresh your memory of different streets and other parts of the city. For beginners, it is a great way to broaden their horizons of possible themes and routes.
Tour guide, author of more than 45 tours around Moscow, winner of the All-Russian Tourism Workers Competition-2022 in the category «Best Tour Guide in Russia».
Every week about 10 people go through the procedure. Among the applicants there are those who have been working in the field for 5-10 years, as well as recent graduates of educational programmes for tour guides and guide-interpreters.
Most of the Commission’s decisions on the results of practical work during this period have been favourable. Exceptions are often curiosities. For example, a guide of tourist routes (hiking, tents, kayaks — that’s all) was mistakenly enrolled in the certification of tour guides and refused to pass the exam. However, there are also those who have not passed the certification for objective reasons.
I like the way the Tourism Committee organises the process, but the attitude of some applicants is too frivolous. Someone did not take the trouble to familiarise himself with the details of the procedure beforehand, others "fail" questions about methodology and safety, how to show and reveal the object. For example, a young man offered a walking tour from Arbat Square to Sretensky Boulevard without thinking that this route would take 5-6 hours. These are just a few examples of why a tour guide needs special training and work experience.
Tour guide, author of more than 45 excursions in Moscow, winner of the All-Russia Competition of Tourism Workers — 2022 in the nomination «The Best Tour Guide in Russia».
The author sees two main reasons for the good results of the exam. On the one hand, those who are confident in their knowledge and are familiar with the capital’s cultural heritage are in the lead. On the other hand, the members of the commission have repeatedly stated that their task is to check the presence of the necessary minimum knowledge and to point out the direction of self-development, not to turn the certification into a rigid filter with a bar at the level of a doctoral thesis.
We are strict during the examination not because we are malicious, but because we are involved in creating the image of the city that will be seen and remembered by visitors to the capital.
In the practical part, there are already certain preferences in the choice of questions. Of course, if a person sees a tour that he or she has been on many times, he or she will like to choose it (the author of this article briefly recalled a bus tour of Stalin’s skyscrapers when he or she received the question «The construction of skyscrapers in Moscow in the 20th-21st centuries»). If there was no " local " topic among the questions, the candidates preferred the most popular variants. In particular, almost everyone who got the question «The legacy of a famous architect in Moscow» talked about either Fyodor Shekhtel or Konstantin Melnikov.
During my time on the Commission, not a single applicant has been asked about the Arbat or Tverskaya Street. And since excursions are my calling card here, and I teach these topics to future guides during training sessions, I'd like to tell about them personally when it's my turn to take the exam.
Photo: STEKLO, FotograFFF, Dmitrijs Dmitrijevs, SmartPhotoLab — Shutterstock.com, Glenn Carstens-Peters — Unsplash; Mosturizm; Moscow Mayor and Government Portal/Evgeny Samarin
