Sector managers – earning your royal chartered status
Nick Sellwood, Lead Chartered Assessor, CIMSPA
Danielle Peel, Head of Organisation, Design and Development, CIMSPA
An introduction to chartered status
In this session, Nick Sellwood and Danielle Peel took delegates through the process of how sector managers can become a chartered member.
Nick started by defining what chartered meant.
“We are looking at performance in the workplace.We are looking for applied learning and skills. It’s very specific and very different from sitting an educational exam.”
There are two classes of chartered – Chartered Member and Chartered Fellow. Members are for those in strategic and operations roles, while Fellow relates to those whose roles are predominantly strategic. - He continued, “In my mind I see these roles at the same level. The skills are quite different, but whether you are excellent at operations or excellent strategically, you are excellent and you are chartered.”
The chartered process
Nick outlined the four phases of the chartered process:
Phase one – self triage
A candidate’s application must demonstrate the prerequisites; qualification, experience and an endorsement. There must also be appropriate identification of the role, environment, population groups and level of training a candidate undertakes.
Their qualifications must be recognised by CIMSPA and their personal endorsement must be from a CIMSPA partner organisation or CIMSPA member.
Phase two – assessment
The candidate is assessed against the agreed chartered competencies. This assessment will normally take place via an online viva (video interview).
Phase three – outcome
If the candidate passes, they are awarded chartered status. The candidate will agree to abide by CIMSPA’s code of conduct and continuing professional development policy. Candidates whose application falls short and don’t yet reach the agreed chartered competencies will be able to reapply after six months.
Phase four – maintenance
To maintain their chartered status, candidates must demonstrate that they have undertaken relevant continuing professional development (10 points per year, which is approximately 10 hours).
Applying for chartered status
The chartered process will be unique. Managers will be assigned an assessor, who will support them through the process and mould this around the manager’s individual situations. The assessment process will therefore reflect the population groups, the experience and environment in which a manager works.
There are three routes within the process, which have been developed to reflect people’s experience, qualifications and whether or not they have positive endorsement of professional competence from a CIMSPA employer partner or a line manager/senior manager or director who is a CIMSPA member.
Nick described the viva process as a dialogue. Managers will be sent questions seven days in advance of the viva, at which point they will need to submit evidence to support their intended responses. This evidence can be anything from minutes of meetings and a job description to a personal professional development plan. There is also a chartered pathway opening up for excellent practitioners in our sector. Personal trainers may want to submit video evidence at this point. With practitioners, the evidence base won’t be with peers, but will be based on the workplace environment.
From the moment managers enter the process, they have six months to complete it. The viva interview itself will take up to three hours. The assessor has three working days to return the transcript of the interview to the applicant, who then has seven days to review the transcript and make any adjustments. They can also submit more evidence to support their answers. Once this has been submitted, CIMSPA has 21 days to assess it, including an internal verification process, before they give the results. Managers will receive a pass, a referral or a fail as well as feedback from the assessment.
Nick ended his presentation with a clear perspective of the genuine accessibility of CIMSPA’s new chartered process. “We’ve tried to make this workplace applied, rather than an exam, which is artificial. We also tried to create a process that allows you to draw on evidence that you’ve already got and the things that you do in your day-to-day job to showcase you in the best light. The assessor is not there to trip you up; the assessor is there to try to get as much out of you as possible.”