Building a common valuation language across a firm

In a valuation firm of any size, the costliest misunderstandings are rarely about technique. They are about language: what a basis of value means, what a scope of work must record, what a report has to disclose. When teams in different offices — or different countries — answer those questions differently, review cycles lengthen, cross-border work gets harder to assemble, and quality becomes harder to evidence. For learning and development leads, a common valuation language is infrastructure, not enrichment.

Why firms reach for global standards

The case is made most plainly by practitioners themselves. JLL, an IVSC sponsor, put it this way through its Global Head of Valuation Advisory in an interview with the IVSC: “Global businesses such as JLL need global standards. The IVS are the only recognisable global standards.”

The logic generalises well beyond any one firm. When clients, reviewers and counterparties sit in different jurisdictions, an external reference that everyone recognises removes an entire category of internal translation — and the disputes that come with it.

What the standards actually standardise

The International Valuation Standards standardise the grammar of the work rather than the answers. The General Standards cover the valuation framework, scope of work, bases of value, valuation approaches, data and inputs, valuation models, and documentation and reporting; the Asset Standards add requirements for businesses, intangibles, real property, development property, financial instruments and other asset classes.

A firm whose people share that grammar can disagree productively about judgement — because everything around the judgement is already agreed. That is what a common language buys: not uniform conclusions, but reviewable ones.

Where professional rules already point

For many firms, part of the common language already exists. The RICS Red Book Global Standards apply to RICS members and RICS-regulated firms globally and fully incorporate IVS; the current edition, effective 31 January 2025, incorporates the IVS published on 31 January 2024.

If parts of your firm work under the Red Book, those teams are already operating within an IVS-aligned framework. The L&D task is then one of extension: bringing analysts, reviewers, support functions and non-RICS specialisms onto the same conceptual map, so the shared language does not stop at a regulatory boundary.

Designing the programme

A workable design usually has three layers: baseline orientation to the standards for everyone whose work touches a valuation, deeper role-specific learning for those applying and signing reports, and a refresh rhythm aligned to the standards cycle itself — the IVS 2028 Exposure Draft was consulted on in early 2026, with the next edition due to be issued in January 2027 and effective from January 2028, so refresh points can be planned years ahead. For firms that want a shared baseline delivered consistently, group enrolment is available through the IVSC’s training site.