AIIM+ Pro and the CIP

Update 3/25: I'm not sure whether AIIM is recording AIIM22 sessions; if not, they obviously wouldn't be available to be added to the AIIM+ Pro catalog. 

Update 5/23: Added current figures, timings, and CEU totals. 

One of the topics that came up on AIIM's CIP Town Hall on March 18 was the possibility of allowing CIPs to renew using CEUs again. That topic led to a discussion of AIIM+ Pro, AIIM's new approach to training. In this post, I will explore why I think AIIM+ Pro isn't the right approach for CEUs, at least as currently implemented. 

I have an AIIM+ Pro membership, and everything in this post reflects my interacting with it on an ongoing basis since early February. 

First, let me start by noting that it is a massive improvement to the look & feel to the old AIIM training. If you haven't taken a look at AIIM training in a while, since the old "death by PowerPoint", it really is night & day difference. So kudos to AIIM, and in particular Peggy Winton, Georgina Clelland, and Theresa Resek, for an exceptional reimagining of AIIM's training offerings. 

However, from a CIP's point of view, AIIM+ Pro doesn't really meet the need for CEUs from a couple of different perspectives - at least by itself. First, and most significantly, at present the content consists of: 

• The reimagined learning modules. These are a synthesis of the best of the preexisting AIIM content - courses like Foundations of Intelligent Information Management, Modern Records Management, Business Process Management, and Taxonomy & Metadata. So while there are likely nuggets of value here & there, the CIP exam covers all of these areas already and it's reasonable to expect a CIP to be familiar with most of them. There is new content coming - but is new content going to be added regularly enough to make it a reasonable ask for CIPs for CEUs? 60 CEUs over 3 years = a lot of courses to be developed. 
• Update 5/23: 
• No new educational content has been added since I wrote the original post, though there have been some tweaks to learning paths etc. 
• There are 29 educational courses, with durations ranging from 20 - 60 minutes and an average of 32 minutes. Since most certifications award 1 CEU per educational contact hour, calculating by the average gives 14.5 CEUs, while using the exact timings gives 16.0. (I can't get timing for 4 of them as they still show "new" instead of the duration. Calculating them at 30 min each.)
• AIIM21 conference sessions. If a CIP didn't go to conference, or even did but didn't attend all the sessions, there is some valuable content here. I don't know whether AIIM plans to record the AIIM22 sessions, but if so I'd expect that they'd be added sometime after conference.
• The CIP Study Guide. If you're a CIP, you should already have this and be sufficiently familiar with it that I don't think this is a value-add from a CIP CEUs perspective. 

In other words, much of the content currently in AIIM+ Pro wouldn't be that suited to the purpose of CIPs' continued professional growth and development.  

In addition, the way in which CEUs are currently tracked is also problematic in a couple of different ways. First, CEUs are awarded arbitrarily, something Peggy explicitly identified as an issue with the previous approach. 

• Every item completed is awarded 1 CEU, irrespective of its duration. So the "Introduction to Creating, Capturing and Sharing Information" course, which is listed in the AIIM+ interface as 2 minutes long, is worth 1 CEU. CEUs for CIP, and most certifications, generally track at 1 CEU per contact hour of educational content. 
• Every item completed is awarded 1 CEU, whether it's technically educational content or not. I have completed 4 of the learning paths, and the certificate awarded for each learning path is itself worth 1 CEU as shown in the screenshot below. 

• Every item completed is awarded 1 CEU, irrespective of how long you took to complete it. As a test, I just completed the How to Improve Information Security course. It's listed in the interface at 20 minutes. I timed it, and from open to completion it took me about 1:30 to do it. But I still got 1 full CEU for it. 
• As of May 23, I have completed all learning paths, all learning courses, all 11 of the CIP Study Guide sessions, and one AIIM21 webinar. The interface shows me as having completed 55 courses; the CEUs are not summed, and 1, Introduction to Digitalizing Information-Intensive Processes, is listed at 0 CEUs. If I add up all the "1 CEU" messages as shown in the screenshot, AIIM shows me as having 54 CEUs. 

Next, any AIIM content that isn't in the LMS - webinars, the AIIM conference, etc. is not tracked in the LMS. In years past, AIIM awarded a set amount of CEUs for an in-person conference - say, 12.5 - based on the combined length of the educational session days, so having a set amount of CEUs might skirt that issue. But I couldn't find any way in the interface to add them. If the answer is to have AIIM do it on your behalf, that seems like going back to the same issues AIIM had identified with the previous process in terms of both the customer experience and staff resource requirements. 

There is no non-AIIM content tracked. This makes sense of course - but if AIIM does go back to doing CEUs, they cannot limit them to just AIIM content. I mean, they can, but that's a terrible approach and one that would be significantly outside the norms of certifications and CEUs. And again there is no way to upload non-AIIM CEUs at present. 

There is no indicator for any previously submitted CEUs, so if you already submitted some, or even all, you needed for renewal, they aren't listed here. I know Peggy said that everything is on the table, but I think this is going to take some thinking through in order to not alienate the CIPs who neared or met the requirements as well as concerns about those who hadn't or won't. 

There's no indicator for when your CIP is due for renewal. As I noted in a previous post, AIIM is currently relying on its records to send you an email allowing you to retake the CIP exam a few weeks or months before your renewal date. 

And there's no CIP certificate, or badge, or any way for you to know whether your CIP is active or not. 

Maybe some of these are configuration issues where something just needs to be enabled that hadn't been because CEUs for CIP were going away. But the other issues, around non-LMS content, still need to be addressed. And this only matters if CEUs for renewal return. 

One last thought. Currently, CIP renewal via exam is $135 for members and $150 for non-members. This is also what it cost to do CEUs-based renewal before the February changes. However, in order to use AIIM+ Pro, CIPs *also* would have to pay the AIIM+ Pro subscription fees of $49/month or $490/year. Over the course of 3 years, that works out to $1,470 if the CIP maintained it the entire time PLUS the member renewal fee of $135, for a total cost over 3 years of $1,605. That's an expensive certification to maintain.