Top Up Your Points!
When a member joins the IAP, he or she provides us with a detailed CV, which we evaluate to determine the appropriate initial grade of membership. You all know that, because you no doubt spent much time trying to remember when you did that OOP course, how many staff you were responsible for in 1992 or whatever.
What you may not know is the mechanism for that determination. What happens is that a number of points is associated with each component of your CV. These are accredited to one of four headings: Programming, Systems Analysis/Design, Business and X. The mysterious X points are those that are considered to be valuable to the rounded professional but which are not attributable to any of the previous headings. There are minimum point values that must be achieved (both in total and under the four sub-headings) for an applicant to be admitted to a given grade of membership.
Let’s suppose that you were elected to the Associate Member grade with a total of 450 points several years ago. Since then, you’ve been amassing experience points and, probably, some training points as well. The chances are that these will exceed the couple of hundred extra points you need to be upgraded to MIAP. But we don’t know that unless you tell us! I know that means you’ll have to update your CV but there is some good news. You remember the registration fee you paid for your initial evaluation? Well, that covers all subsequent evaluations for upgrades. To all intents and purposes then, upgrading procedures are free.
So, if you think you may be entitled to an upgrade, let us know. Email the office at admin@iap.org.uk or ring Anne on 020 8 567 2118. If you’d like more information about the points system, email me at eo@iap.org.uk and I’ll send you a detailed description of how it works. I’ll also be happy to respond to any specific queries you may have.
Robin Jones, Education Officer
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]
