The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) today announces a new Experience Assessment route to membership, designed to deliver on the Institute’s clear commitment to a more inclusive approach to membership.
The Experience Assessment route will enable experienced HR professionals to access one of the three professional levels of CIPD membership (Assoc CIPD, Chartered MCIPD and Chartered FCIPD) through assessment against the relevant membership criteria. It is designed to reflect the ever more diverse career paths that increasingly see many people entering HR from other disciplines, choosing to specialise in one particular specialist area of the profession, or pursuing less linear HR careers.
The new route will enable the CIPD to better cater for people who, by virtue of these more diverse career paths or for other reasons, have risen within the HR profession without starting out with a CIPD qualification, and have not to date had their contribution fully recognised. The new route caters both for HR generalists and particularly for HR specialists, enabling them to demonstrate appropriate levels of experience and knowledge for membership admission.
The Experience Assessment route is built on the CIPD’s rigorous new membership criteria and therefore draws extensively on the contents of its HR Profession Map.
The CIPD is today inviting tenders from suppliers with appropriate backgrounds and experience in delivering this or similar kinds of assessments. Initial tenders are due by Friday 16 July 2010, with approved suppliers in place by early August. The new route will be available to experienced HR professionals from 1 January 2011.
Sue Upton, Director of Membership at the CIPD, said: “The CIPD HR Profession Map has enabled us to build rigorous new membership criteria that define professionalism in terms of what you know, what you do and how you need to do it in order to establish and maintain real workplace impact in HR roles at all levels. Our new Experience Assessment route allows HR professionals to be assessed against those membership criteria in practice.
“The Experience Assessment route opens up professional membership to groups of experienced professionals who we’ve not been fully equipped to cater for in the past. The new assessment methods are specifically designed to elicit relevant and appropriate evidence against each set of criteria. By adding a clear focus on experience and behaviours – underpinned by an appropriate level of knowledge and understanding – the new route does more than just maintain existing rigour and standards, it marks a significant raising of the bar.”
Further details of the new route will be finalised and announced once the tender process has been completed. Successful tenders will establish a small number of partners capable of working with the CIPD to deliver the new route to membership across the UK and internationally from January 2011.
