AIIM's CIP Townhall - My Thoughts and Takeaways

AIIM held a town hall today to discuss the recent changes to CIP. Outgoing AIIM President Peggy Winton noted that there were two major topics in scope for the town hall - proctored vs. unproctored exam and retesting vs. CEUs. Originally scheduled for 45 minutes, it ended up going close to double that and frankly probably could have continued. 

Update: I want to thank Peggy and AIIM for holding this, for giving the CIP community an opportunity to weigh in, and for staying on significantly past the scheduled ending time. 

I will post a link to the video and/or transcript once they are available, but here are my brief notes and takeaways. 

• AIIM apologized - for the lack of communication. 
• Peggy opened by noting that she'd talked to the AIIM Board and a number of other association people and that she believed this was the right decision. 
• Nobody spoke in favor of taking an exam every three years, even an unproctored one. One person did suggest a combination of CEUs and a retake every 5 years (I think?)….
• There was some consensus around the suggestion to have preapproved providers in order to ensure the quality of CEUs.
• Several speakers noted that PMI, IAPP, etc. have figured out how to balance proctoring and CEUs, ISO 17024 accreditation, etc. in the time of COVID. Those organizations have been ridiculously successful over the last couple of years. Then again, they also had marketing....
• There were a couple of suggestions about how to deal with the "significant number" of CIP candidates who for various reasons can't take a proctored exam online or in person, including using AIIM staff and AIIM community volunteers. The former doesn't scale, not with 14 staff, but as this is an exception, I think it's doable. Having AIIM volunteers do it is a little more problematic from an exam security perspective, but it's not insurmountable I don't think.. 
• Peggy alluded to my post about the exam being compromised twice and was very dismissive of concerns about exam security. 
• Peggy kept referring to CIPs who were grandfathered in and have maintained their CEUs ever since, with the result that they've never taken the actual exam. That list is down to me - and I've taken the exam, beta, proctored, and unproctored - at least a dozen times - and perhaps one other CIP. I can't confirm because I don't have access to those records anymore. But this is a complete non sequitur, yet she repeated it more than once.
• Strategy and marketing were outside the scope of this Town Hall, but one participant did bring up AIIM's apparent lack of strategy towards the end. Peggy did indicate that there was "now" staff ownership of CIP and that things would improve moving forward. I'll be curious to determine who that owner is because from the outside it appears that current staff is pretty well booked doing other things. Still no, nada, zero marketing of CIP. 
• AIIM is going to send out a survey on the two issues identified - what the exam process should look like including proctoring, and what the renewal process should look like. 
• Peggy ended the session with a couple of minutes of discussion about how CIP is a separate stand-alone thing that isn't updated as AIIM+ Pro is, it's out of sync with AIIM's content strategy, etc. There's too much to unpack there for this blog post, but it sounded like she wanted the CIP exam to move to rolling updates. If the exam isn't proctored and doesn't need to be psychometrically defensible, this is a pretty easy thing to do - but in my professional estimation, it misses the point. It also has implications for updating training materials to ensure they remain aligned to the exam. 

My takeaway is that AIIM did not anticipate this amount of blowback, but still doesn't understand that it's not just the lack of communications. 

I didn't hear any willingness to go back to a proctored exam. I do think they might be willing to go back to CEUs as an option, though Peggy seemed strongly inclined to limit CEUs from outside AIIM and mentioned AIIM+ Pro a number of times as the path forward. I wrote a separate post addressing the AIIM+ Pro subscription as a CEU mechanism. 

Without a proctored exam, the CIP remains a weird hybrid - it's a certificate program that requires ongoing maintenance. This is the Hubspot model, which Peggy cited, but it flies in the face of literally every other certification in the information management/information governance industry. I'm not prepared to believe that AIIM is smarter than PMI, CompTIA, Microsoft, IBM, ASAE, IAPP, ISACA, ISC(2), and the list goes on for a while. 

At this point I see no indication that AIIM will change back to a proctored exam, at least while Peggy remains in place. I don't know the extent to which the rest of AIIM's senior management backs that specific decision, but if CIP is to be successful, the next CEO needs to make that change, the required development of a non-compromised exam, and an actual strategy and marketing plan, the top priorities. If this doesn't happen, I predict that CIP numbers will drop precipitously and AIIM will be left with no choice but to end it.