CIPD Centenary

The other day, I received my new membership card celebrating 100 years of CIPD, and then the latest issue of People Management popped through the letterbox with its inbuilt, if slightly repetitive, supplement telling the story of the 100 year history.  I usually enjoy historical perspectives, so why is it I feel marginalised by it?  And not for the first time.

 

People Management traces the history of CIPD back to the formation of the Welfare Workers Association, forerunner of the Institute of Personnel Management, but has nothing to say about the origins of the Institute of Training and Development (ITD) as the British Institute of Training Officers in 1964.  The picture of the institute’s magazines over the years follows the same line, through IPM publications, with no mention of any ITD journal.

 

This is part of a paradigm that regards learning and development (L&D) as a sub-set of human resources, ignoring the many thousands of L&D practitioners (and CIPD members) who do not work within an HR function – writers, consultants, coaches, independent trainers, vendors of L&D services, e-learning developers, learning technologists, staff of colleges and universities, community learning practitioners, and more.

 

When I blogged about this before, I attracted retorts from CIPD, but clearly the mindset hasn’t changed.

 

Some of my best friends are HR professionals; many of my clients work in HR; but I’m not one of them.  I am happy to be part of the CIPD community, as I have been for nearly three decades, but does that mean my professional identity has to be subsumed? Surely CIP isn’t trying to drop the D?