By Richard Goldsbrough, Senior Membership Manager, CIPD

I’ve been having lots of conversations in recent weeks with members, talking about value for money and how they can get more from their CIPD membership. It’s really important to us here at the CIPD that all of our members get value from their membership and so I thought I would outline a few ways in which the CIPD have looked to support members over the past year.

As you will know the CIPD is a charity, with two broad objectives – to champion better work and working lives, and to be a professional body supporting our members with content, community and personal and professional development. We rely on membership fees to provide more than 60% of our income, which means as a member you are contributing directly to supporting us in our dual roles. You are supporting the HR & L&D profession and allowing us to conduct research, engage with organisations and government on policy and strategy around the people profession and of course supporting us to create new content to support you in your roles. On top of this your membership fees allow us to continue to support you through our online communities, branch events, Ebsco database and many more member benefits.

Some examples of the things you have helped fund over this past membership year include:

• Our research and policy teams created new guidance and insight on employee voice, evidence-based decision making, health & wellbeing at work, skills in the workplace, the menopause and flexible working. This was on top of our annual work around sector megatrends and our Labour Market Outlook. Have a look at everything here.
• The redevelopment of the Profession Map – the standards which underpin all of our membership grades and will ensure membership continues to stay relevant and in line with the sector
• We redeveloped our member benefits page, invested in our communities platform and enhanced the member experience on the Ebsco journals platform making it easier for members to access things like the Harvard Business Review and other related publications.
• More than 20,000 new students began their CIPD qualification, the 5th year in a row that this number has increased

Without your membership fee and continued support we would not be able to do much of the work we do. By supporting us as a member you allow us to promote and develop your profession.

As you will see from the link above, there are numerous benefits you receive as a member of the CIPD. You may not have been aware of all of these and I really encourage you to dip in and check out these benefits and perhaps use a benefit you have not used before. For example, why not log into the communities or LinkedIn member only group to see what other members are talking about and how they are solving their day to day challenges, or perhaps have a look at the events your local branch are running over the next few months to see how you can gain from the free learning and networking on offer.

Maybe go and have a look in our knowledge hub and see how our content can support you with your work. We have tens of thousands of members using these tools and resources every month.

The membership team here spend a lot of time looking at how we can improve the membership offer. We’ve got lots of things in the pipeline but just a couple of things that will definitely be coming up in the next year:

• A new communities app to help you access the content and community easier than ever before. This will also host a digital version of your membership card
A set of new careers pages and new career support tools to inspire and support you in moving to the next stage of your career
• Improved experience of our website and content, ensuring you can access the right content when you need it
A new communications series to ensure you know all the things you receive as a member and to keep you up to date with new membership developments as they happen.

We’ll keep writing to you to tell you about these things as and when they land, but if you ever want to keep up to date with the latest membership offering then just bookmark this page, where we regularly update on all of the things we are doing for members
Thanks for reading and please do get in touch if you have any feedback.