The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is a professional association for human resource management professionals. It is headquartered in Wimbledon, London, England. The organisation was founded in 1913 and has over 130,000 members internationally working across private, public and voluntary sectors.
Bedfordshire Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently worked with the University of Bedfordshire (pictured) on the CIPD Challenge.
The University of Bedfordshire is based in Bedford and Luton, the two largest towns in Bedfordshire. A campus in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire is for students studying Nursing and Midwifery. A further campus in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, teaches business studies, electronic engineering, and telecommunications.
It has approximately 24,000 students. Nearly 3,000 international students study with the university. The university was created by the merger of the University of Luton and the Bedford campus of De Montfort University in August 2006 following approval by the Privy Council. In 2012 it achieved FairTrade status.
CIPD Bedfordshire Group Committee members, Paula Grayson, Sandra Brown and Letitia Winston worked with Sarah Jones from the University of Bedfordshire on the CIPD Challenge in the practice week for undergraduates on the BA Hons. in HRM.
On 3 March 2014, students were briefed on four “Consolidating Culture” challenges to provide good practice HR processes. The guiding principle was to design a process which should assist in consolidating and reinforcing the culture of the organisation.
(Over time the CIPD have developed a comprehensive, effective and wide range of resources for HR professionals. One aspect of the work is the creation of a CIPD Profession Map. Integral to this is the Courage to Challenge Model, which is part of a sequence of themes that look at behaviours around curiosity, decisive thinking, collaboration and being a winning influencer. All skills that the Bedfordshire students would have needed to deploy, in order to complete their assignment….ED).
They needed to use good practice guidance from the CIPD and other sources, remembering organisations are operating in difficult economic times. All additional costs needed to be justified in terms of improving productivity, increasing employee engagement or reducing an existing employee cost pressure. Each team was asked to choose one challenge from:
• designing a new induction process for a large successful retail organisation to induct and socialise recruits, remembering to embed the strong values as soon as possible, while ensuring health and safety together with all legal requirements were fulfilled from day one
• using social media in recruitment and selection for a small and relatively unknown web design company needing a web designer who could work within a performance driven culture with tight deadlines to meet client needs. They had to improve the poor job description and person specification written by the Managing Director, including taking out illegal elements, then outline their campaign and process, especially how social media could be used in the short-listing stage
• improving motivation at a recruitment agency providing education professionals to the local authority and individual schools where the staff are partly paid on commission. They needed to address the low staff retention rate and high absence rate through appropriate non-financial rewards to recognise and provide incentives to staff
Students formed their teams, chose their challenges and got to work.
On 6 March, Sarah, Paula, Sandra and Letitia judged their proposals, selecting a runner-up team and a winning team. The presentations were all excellent, offering thoughtful, appropriate and legal advice to their organisations.
Their professionalism demonstrated how much they had learned during their course, not only about Human Resources but also how to write and present practical solutions to employment issues using good practice. The runners-up were given University of Bedfordshire conference folders.
The five students in the winning team will each have two days of work shadowing with CIPD Bedfordshire Group committee members.
Article contributed by Sarah Jones and Paula Grayson
(If the University has an image of the Challenge Teams, or the winners ceremony, email it to the editor and we will add it to this narrative…ED.)
University image by Kriscollins at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons
