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Feature Continuing professional development peoplemanagement.co.uk/features

The CIPD’s new route to membership offers recognition for those who have acquired relevant HR experience and knowledge, writes Hashi Syedain

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Experience counts

HR professionals in multinational companies, at a large charity and in a fast-growing Indian enterprise are among the

first to benefit from the CIPD’s new “experience assessment” route to membership (see interviews, facing page and overleaf).

Participants in the trial described the process as “rigorous” and “thorough” and spoke of the value of taking a step back from busy day jobs to evaluate their own careers and CPD needs. !e new route is open to all HR

professionals who can demonstrate the required knowledge and experience. !is makes it more flexible than the CIPD’s previous competence-based route to professional membership. It takes three to four months to complete, explains head of membership Christine Williams, and is aimed at those who haven’t qualified by traditional routes, but nonetheless wish to benefit from CIPD recognition. “!e new route reflects ever-more diverse career paths that see many people coming to HR from other disciplines, pursuing less linear HR careers or coming from specialist backgrounds,” she explains.

To be considered for experience assessment, HR professionals start by arranging a diagnostic phone call with the CIPD and submitting an up-to-date CV. !e purpose of the call is to assess whether they have sufficient experience and knowledge for the route and to advise on what level of membership they should go for.

Experience assessment is available for the three levels of professional membership – associate, chartered member and chartered fellow – covering professionals working from support functions through to a strategic level. !e evidence required for each grade draws extensively on the content of the CIPD’s HR profession map.

Candidates accepted after the diagnostic call then go through four forms of assessment. !e first three involve gathering a body of work-based evidence, which must be submitted online within eight weeks. !is includes an impact report, outlining projects on which the candidate has worked, a self

assessment plus feedback from line managers and colleagues and a detailed case-study exercise, based on a fictitious scenario, that focuses on knowledge and the ability to apply it. Candidates can address the case study either from a generalist or a specialist point of view, says Williams, depending on their own particular professional background.!e final part of the jigsaw is an

in-depth professional discussion with a CIPD assessor, who will probe aspects of the evidence submitted and the candidate’s other experience.

Williams points out how important it is for candidates to realise that they do need to have an appropriate level of experience to be accepted. “!is isn’t a easy route in,” says Williams. “Unless you’ve been there, done it and can prove it, this isn’t the route for you.”

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Feature Continuing professional development peoplemanagement.co.uk/features

Experience counts

Christine Amyes, chartered FCIPD, executive director, people, New Charter Housing Trust New Charter Housing Trust Group (NCHT) was created 10 years ago to take over council housing in Tameside, Greater Manchester, and has subsequently added housing in Gedling, Nottinghamshire. It employs 850 people and manages 18,500 properties.

Christine Amyes joined the trust a year after its creation and led HR throughout the organisational transformation that followed, including the absorption of Gedling two years ago. She chairs the sector skills council for housing, is a regular conference speaker and had a long career in civil service HR before joining New Charter.

Yet circumstances meant that Amyes never upgraded beyond associate CIPD membership. “I did a BA in professional training and development and a postgraduate diploma in the psychology of coaching at Leeds Metropolitan University, but they weren’t qualifying courses for graduate membership,”

Sandeep !apa, chartered FCIPD, associate VP, HR for MARG Group. It’s hard for people in the UK to contemplate growth such as that experienced by Chennai-based engineering and construction company MARG. Founded only 20 years ago, its revenues have grown in the past six years from Rs 603 million (£8.6 million) to Rs 10 billion (£130 million) and it now employs about 3,000 people. Sandeep !apa joined MARG a year ago with a brief to develop the organisational structure and systems to reflect its transformation into a large organisation. It has meant, for example, embedding core values and introducing leadership grades and a career progression model. “No one else in the construction sector in India has done this,” comments !apa.

Before joining MARG, !apa had spent two years in an organisational change role with Al Habib Group, a healthcare, pharmaceuticals and construction company, in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. “HR in 80 per cent of organisations in this region consists only of

recruitment and compensation management. !e chairman at Al Habib wanted me to create a performance-based work culture,” says !apa. He led a programme to introduce competencies and an appraisal system that reflected them. Although there was resistance at first, he recalls, extensive training, including video training and customer focus groups, plus open communications, won most people over. “It came out clearly that if we didn’t change, the company wouldn’t stay in business,” he says.

It was during his time at Al Habib that !apa took his first CIPD course – but he realised that the requirement to attend a module in the UK would prevent him from completing the traditional route to membership.

Having spent more than 15 years in HR and management roles, !apa was well placed for the experience assessment route. “!e CIPD HR profession map is highly relevant to the Indian and Middle Eastern context,” he says. “Many people here are interested in membership.”

she explains. She knew her membership grade was “out of sync” with her “professional level”, but found that there was no obvious way to address this problem. “I needed a route that was based on work and experience,” she says.

Amyes found the assessment process a useful experience. It confirmed many of the things she knew about herself – such as her collaborative management style – but also helped her to focus on her own professional development. “!e assessors told me they’d like to see my CPD more clearly linked to feedback,” she says.

“Being a chartered fellow,” she adds, “gives me the confidence to be on an equal footing with other senior professionals.”

‘I knew my membership grade was out

of sync with my professional level’

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Melissa Kew, chartered MCIPD, HR manager at Moody’sMelissa Kew is an HR manager at credit rating agency Moody’s, with a remit across 11 locations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After graduating in psychology from the University of the West of England, she joined accountancy firm Arthur Andersen as a graduate recruitment administrator in 2001. Kew stayed on after the firm’s transfer to Deloitte and then moved to HBOS before joining Moody’s in 2006. Although she had embarked on the study route to CIPD membership at HBOS, and had associate CIPD membership, personal issues intervened to prevent her from completing the final management report to achieve chartered status. “!e longer you are away from the study route, the more daunting it becomes and you close the door a bit,” she says.

Among the experiences she wrote up as part of her experience assessment was the implementation of a working-from-home policy in Italy and her handling of a performance management situation. !e assessment interview was very thorough, says Kew. “!e assessors want to understand the decisions you made, why you made them and what you could have done differently,” she explains. !e process as a whole was very helpful, says Kew. “It’s easy to get

embroiled in your job and work a bit on auto-pilot. It makes you take a step back when you have to produce a report.” Becoming a chartered member, meanwhile, “has been a fantastic confidence boost”.

Julian Sykes, chartered FCIPD, director of talent and development for enabling functions, AstraZenecaPharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca employs 66,000 people worldwide, including 10,000 in support functions such as finance, HR, legal and corporate affairs. Julian Sykes is responsible for talent definition, development, retention and resourcing, as well as for strategic workforce planning and overseeing international assignments among support staff.

“I’ve worked in HR-related fields for most of my career, but there was never a natural time to go

down the qualification route,” he says. After graduating in combined social sciences from Durham University, Sykes had started training as an accountant before realising it was not for him and moving to a recruitment consultancy. !ere he got involved in HR process re-engineering, which led to a move to Barclays, initially in an organisational development role and then in various other HR positions. After at stint at psychometric testing company SHL, Sykes joined AstraZeneca four years ago.

“I found myself at director level in a top FTSE-100 company, where it no longer made sense to start the process,” he says. Yet he still felt that CIPD recognition was “a statement of capability”.

One of Sykes’ interests in trialling the experience assessment route was to see if it could be used to build up HR capability within AstraZeneca, one of the support functions he is responsible for. “Lots of people come into HR via other routes,” he says. “!is offers an opportunity for them to engage with the value that CIPD membership can bring.”

‘I found myself at director level and it no longer made sense to start the process, yet CIPD recognition is a statement of capability’

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Feature Continuing professional development peoplemanagement.co.uk/features

Experience assessmentwww.cipd.co.uk/ experience-assessment

If you think you’ve got the experience to take this route, you can contact the CIPD to book your diagnostic call on 020 8612 6208

HR profession mapwww.cipd.co.uk/hr-profession-map

PM news CIPD launches new experience assessment route/ea111

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Graham Watson, chartered MCIPD, independent HR consultant who is embarking on the route to become a chartered fellowGraham Watson describes himself as an HR/OD specialist, with a specific focus on resourcing, talent and leadership development. An independent consultant, his current projects include helping a charity to restructure its training function, leadership development in a media organisation and setting up a talent programme for a Middle Eastern utility.

Watson’s HR career has encompassed all three sectors (public, private and third) either as an employee, an interim manager or consultant; this includes a year as interim head of training at the CIPD. Yet, in common with many who came to HR as a second career (Watson was a psychiatric nurse and a tour operator in earlier life), he never quite found time to complete his professional qualifications. He has a certificate in training practice and qualifications in occupational testing and first thought about obtaining CIPD chartered membership around 10 years ago, while working at City & Guilds. But, halfway through the process, he left his role to set up as an independent consultant. “I was running my own business and didn’t have time to pursue the qualification,” he says. “But I was

committed to it and when this opportunity came up, I grabbed it.” Watson says that the experience assessment route works well for people who have led projects. “If you’ve delivered small or large projects where you’ve managed something end to end, you are well placed,” he says. He cited setting up a graduate internship programme for Defra as part of his assessment and acting as an associate consultant on a senior management assessment centre, run by consultancy OPP on behalf of a large media organisation.

Being professionally qualified is critical, he believes, even for someone with a strong track record. “In a tough market, professional credentials definitely make a difference.”

‘It’s easy to get embroiled in your job and work a bit

on auto-pilot. It makes you take a step back when you have to produce a report’