Hi,

I'm currently in the final year of Lancaster's BA Hons Business with Human Resource Management undergraduate degree programme and am pondering the ability of securing Associate Membership.

As part of the degree course, last year I secured the CIPD level 5 Employment Law Award and I'm looking to "upgrade" my membership to Associate on the back of this. Whilst a student, I am actually the Managing Director of a manufacturing SME and whilst responsible for the day-to-day operations, my main area of focus is everything HR. From dealing with recruitment, contracts, well being packages, disciplinaries, redundancies, settlement agreements and everything else in between, I feel that based on my experience (although acquired over a short space of time) it is enough to warrant Associate Membership without needing to participate in additional study of a complete a full CIPD  diploma etc.

In terms of my reasonings for wanting professional membership, I'm actually going on to complete a PGCE at HE/FE level in September and I feel that having Associate membership will prove beneficial to my aspirations of becoming a business, HR and employment law lecturer. At 30 (I feel old) I want to secure any necessary educational qualifications as quickly as possible; having spent the last 4 year studying my degree (on target to graduate with a first), doing the PGCE next year, I ideally only wanted to spend one further year maximum studying post PGCE (dreams of phd can wait). 

On the start of my educational journey, it was my original plan for any post graduate study such as Masters in HRM to provide level 7 CIPD (or level 5 at the very minimum) as by studying a masters course, I would be eligible to receive funding for this rather than having to pay for the course outright. However, I'm currently at a loss as to what my options are, as I had planned on doing this at UCLAN but their courses appear to have changed, with their advice on this issue being vague at best. 

So, with all that said, if anyone can offer me any advice specific to my situation it would be much appreciated.

TIA, Sophie