Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
01 November 2022 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied
Henda Kleingeld, Programme Director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration (PGDIP) in Financial Planning, is incredibly proud of the candidates who ranked top five in the CFP® Professional Competency Examination.

To become a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), a candidate with a Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning or a BCom (Honours) in Financial Planning must, among others, pass the Professional Competency Examination (PCE) of the Financial Planning Institute of Southern Africa (FPI).

It was recently announced that the top five CFP® Professional Competency Examination candidates (for the June 2022 examinations) are alumni of the School of Financial Planning Law (SFPL) at the University of the Free State (UFS).

On the right trajectory

According to Henda Kleingeld, Programme Director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning Law in the Faculty of Law’s SFPL, they are incredibly proud of the candidates. 

“Being rated as the top five PCE candidates indicates that we are on the right trajectory with the outcomes and assessments for our diplomas. If the top five PCE candidates are alumni of the SFPL – we are doing something right.  We have made many changes in our approach to financial education, and it seems like it is paying off.”

“We now need to ensure that we provide our students with the proper academic background and support to continue to excel.  This will seal our status as the oldest and one of the leading educational providers of financial planning education in the country,” Kleingeld adds.

Confidence in the qualification

The PCE sets candidates on the path towards becoming certified financial planners. The online exam consists of two case studies that test the candidates’ financial planning skills, knowledge, and competent performance in the defined competency areas for financial professionals.

In its Professional Competency Examination Policy, the FPI states that there are six Financial Planning components: Financial Management, Asset Management, Risk Management, Tax Planning, Retirement Planning, and Estate Planning. It strives to prepare professional competency examinations that will provide candidates with the opportunity to demonstrate core or professional competence at a standard appropriate for entry into the financial planning profession.

According to the FPI, the CFP® qualification – an internationally recognised standard for financial planning professionals – gives consumers confidence that the financial planner they are dealing with is suitably qualified to provide advice and information and gives the assurance that they remain up to date with developments in the industry.

First academic institution to offer diploma 
Kleingeld says the SFPL was the first academic institution in South Africa to offer the Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning, and financial education has been its main focus and passion over the past 20 years.

“Keeping up with industry trends is very important to us. Our team of academics and industry experts assists us with maintaining a balance between the academic requirements and how they are translated into the workplace,” she explains.

Kleingeld is of the opinion that the graduates who have passed their qualifications are doing exceptionally well in the industry, with many prominent industry leaders being alumni of the UFS SFPL.  “The school has a reputation in the industry as forward-thinking and innovative. We keep our fingers on the pulse of industry developments, which get incorporated into our curriculum.” 

News Archive

Is milk really so well-known, asks UFS’s Prof. Osthoff
2011-03-17

Prof. Garry Osthoff
Photo: Stephen Collett

Prof. Garry Osthoff opened a whole new world of milk to the audience in his inaugural lecture, Milk: the well-known (?) food, in our Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

Prof. Osthoff has done his research in protein chemistry, immuno-chemistry and enzymology at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria and post-doctoral research at the Bowman-Grey School of Medicine, North Carolina, USA. That was instrumental in establishing food chemistry at the university.
 
He is involved in chemical aspects of food, with a focus on dairy science and technology. He is also involved in the research of cheese processing as well as milk evolution and concentrated on milk evolution in his lecture. Knowledge of milk from dairy animals alone does not provide all the explanations of milk as food.
 
Some aspects he highlighted in his lecture were that milk is the first food to be utilised by young mammals and that it is custom-designed for each species. “However, mankind is an opportunist and has found ways of easy access to food by the practice of agriculture, where plants as well as animals were employed or rather exploited,” he said.
 
The cow is the best-known milk producer, but environmental conditions forced man to select other animals. In spite of breeding selection, cattle seem not to have adapted to the most extreme conditions such as high altitudes with sub-freezing temperatures, deserts and marshes.
 
Prof. Osthoff said the consumption of the milk as an adult is not natural; neither is the consumption of milk across species. This practice of mankind may often have consequences, when signs of malnutrition or diseases are noticed. Two common problems are an allergy to milk and lactose intolerance.
 
Allergies are normally the result of an immune response of the consumer to the foreign proteins found in the milk. In some cases it might help to switch from one milk source to another, such as switching from cow’s milk to goat’s milk.
 
Prof. Osthoff said lactose intolerance – the inability of adult humans to digest lactose, the milk sugar – is natural, as adults lose that ability to digest lactose. The symptoms of the condition are stomach cramps and diarrhoea. This problem is mainly found in the warmer climates of the world. This could be an indication of early passive development of dairy technology. In these regions milk could not be stored in its fresh form, but in a fermented form, in which case the lactose was pre-digested by micro-organisms, and the human population never adapted to digesting lactose in adulthood.
 
According to Prof. Osthoff, it is basically the lactose in milk that has spurred dairy technology. Its fermentation has resulted in the development of yoghurts and all the cheeses that we know. In turn, the intolerance to lactose has spurred a further technological solution: lactose-free milk is currently produced by pre-digestion of lactose with enzymes.
 
It was realised that the milks and products from different species differed in quality aspects such as keeping properties and taste. It was also realised that the nutritional properties differed as well as their effects on health. One example is the mentioned allergy against cow’s milk proteins, which may be solved by the consumption of goat’s milk. The nutritional benefits and technological processing of milk aroused an interest in more information, and it was realised that the information gained from human milk and that of the few domesticated species do not provide a complete explanation of the properties of milk as food. Of the 250 species of milk which have been studied, only the milk of humans and a few domesticated dairy animals has been studied in detail.

Media Release
15 March 2011
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Director: Strategic Communication
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: news@ufs.ac.za

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept