The Background

Founded in 1915, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) are a membership body for HR and L&D professionals, providing expertise and insights to their 150,000 members worldwide.

As part of their role in promoting HR as a career and promoting professional standards, CIPD offer qualifications which are available through study centres worldwide and provide a route to membership and chartered status. Students who are enrolled in a CIPD approved qualification are eligible to join CIPD as a student member while they study and can then have their membership upgraded once they have successfully completed their course.

Once students complete their courses, the process whereby study centres notify CIPD of the outcome and CIPD approve the student’s results and issue their certificates is currently a mostly manual process.

Despite best efforts by the CIPD to improve the existing paper-based process, around 35% of results submitted by the study centres had to be returned due to errors meaning up to 500 students every month experienced delays in receiving their qualification outcome. This high returns rate was also proving to be a drain on CIPD staff, with submissions taking months to resolve.

CIPD chose ClerksWell to help them overhaul this process by designing a digital solution.

The Solution

Workshops were held with key stakeholders at the CIPD to gather requirements and define the key functions of the solution. During this phase it was clear that the solution would need to be bespoke in order to handle complex processes.

In just 3 months, ClerksWell delivered a custom front end solution offering secure logins for a variety of user roles, import and extract functions, audit trail and in-form validation; all features focused on driving efficiency for the organisation.

CIPD staff received in depth training, enabling them to manage the new system independently and to pass knowledge on to external users, resulting in all users benefiting from a system that could:

• Support submission of more accurate results information
• Improve centre experience
• Improve service levels to students and centres
• Reduce administrative time on results checking and returns
• Support the tracking of results submissions

The Results

Since the ORS system was implemented, 22% more results have been processed compared to last year with levels increasing. CIPD centres now have a clear view of the progress of submissions and are able to self-serve and benefit from improved service levels.

Productivity levels of CIPD student administrators has risen by almost 50%, as manual administration effort has fallen from 20 to 11 hours per month, The new process is paperless and therefore fully GDPR compliant.

The once error-ridden submission process has seen a reduction of 19% in the number of submissions returned to centres for correction. This improvement is expected to continue as the system is adopted by more CIPD-approved centres.