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The purpose of the Upgrade Assessment is to establish if your experience meets the membership standards for Chartered Member. You ll need to demonstrate your experience by sharing specific examples of your work and clearly showing how they match the membership standards.

This guide will help you prepare for your upgrade to Chartered Member and give you an idea of what to expect from the written assessment.

Before you start

Before preparing for an upgrade assessment, make sure you’ve:

For full details on the process visit our website.

 

Reasonable adjustments

If you need adjustments to the assessment process, including considerations for recent career breaks due to family leave, please contact our Membership Upgrading team:

 

Membership standards

Make sure you understand the membership requirements for the grade you're applying for. Here's the Chartered Member membership standards.

The membership standards are taken directly from the Profession Map - but you won't be assessed on every standard. We’ve provided more information below on what you'll be asked and what to prepare.

We advise that you download and review the requirements carefully and make notes of the types of knowledge and behaviours that are expected at this level. You should think about and prepare some examples of where you’ve demonstrated this knowledge, these behaviours and impact. You may find it helpful to refer to these notes when writing your submission.

 

How to prepare your application

When completing the written assessment, you'll need to provide specific examples from the last five years. These examples should clearly demonstrate your work and its impact. You can use experiences from your current or recent employment, or your work as a consultant.

Your application will be assessed on the way you’ve applied your knowledge and behaviours in the workplace.

The questions are designed to help you focus on specific evidence that meets the membership requirements. The bullets under each main question are a guide to writing your response. We strongly recommend you follow them and address each element to keep your answers focused.

 

For each question, please include:

  • Timelines for the work you're referring to
  • Which employer they relate to
  • Be clear about what your role was, what you did and what the outcome was, particularly in terms of the impact on the business. Just as you would for a competency based interview.

Each question carries a word limit (shown in italics at the bottom of each question). Anything over this amount will not be assessed (this is to ensure fairness to all applicants).

You need to be succinct and clear in the examples you provide. While the context of your example is relevant, we suggest you keep this short and focus very specifically on what you did, and what the outcome was.

We understand that some of your work may be of a sensitive nature. The information you provide is used only for the purposes of assessing your application to upgrade to Chartered Member. You should remove sensitive information from your submission, such as names of individual staff.

Send us your CV

Send an up-to-date CV or career summary with your application to memupgrading@cipd.co.uk.

This is essential as it gives assessors the context to understand your examples and their impact. It also helps you present your evidence effectively at Chartered Member 

How to prepare your examples

What we mean by 'people practices'

'People practices' refer to the work you do as part of your people role. This includes the processes and approaches used across the employee lifecycle, as outlined in the Profession Map.

For example:

  • Recruiting people
  • Managing grievances
  • Analysing people data
  • Carrying out a learning need analysis
  • Creating talent pools
  • Developing people policies. 

What we mean by 'impact'

'Impact' refers to the value your work creates for stakeholders not the output of your work.

It’s not the ‘what’, but the ‘so what’.

For example, an output of your work might be that you’ve developed a new approach to performance management. But the value created is that managers are now having more focused development discussions, and employees feel the culture is more positive.

You can evidence impact in two ways:

  • Data and metrics that show the measurable value. For example: 
    productivity measures, engagement survey results, absence data.
  • Other evidence that demonstrates change has taken place. For 
    example: feedback from focus groups, skills gaps now being met, senior 
    team regularly reviews performance.

We'd expect most work at Chartered Member level to use metrics as part of measuring impact, but this is dependent on what changes you're delivering. The timescales and scope of the impact we expect to see are:

  • Medium- to long-term value for employees and/or organisations. This means value that is sustained over more than a year. The impact of your work is likely to be both operational and strategic, generated from your wider thinking to change the way things are done. It'll affect other people and business practices and impact a wide range of people across the organisation, including customers and colleagues.

You'll need to explain the 'so what' - the impact of your work and provide evidence, such as:

  • Value/benefits created for stakeholders and the scale/scope of this value
  • Feedback from key stakeholder groups
  • People, organisation, commercial measures (before and after)
  • Business indicators or data (before and after) 
  • Cost savings.

Other information

Terms and conditions

Please refer to the CIPD’s Upgrade terms and conditions.

Support

If you’ve any questions contact our Membership Upgrading team on +44(0)20 8612 6238 (09:00 17:30 UK time, Monday to Friday), or email us at memupgrading@cipd.co.uk.