Success story: Chartered Institute of Marketing

The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) strives for business leaders and opinion formers to recognise the positive contribution professional marketing can bring to their organisations, the economy, and wider society.

CIM support, develop and represent marketers, organisations, and the profession all over the world.

With 130 CIM study centres, in 36 countries, CIM’s diverse range of over 90 training courses and world-renowned qualifications, enable modern marketers to thrive in their roles and deliver long-term success for businesses.

CIM’s employees maintain its brand values - which reflect the Royal Charter status - of:

• Collaborative
• Passionate
• Purposeful
• Relevant
• Responsible

Since December 2020, Access Career Development has been offered to all professional members of CIM. Through Access Career Developement, CIM’s current 27,000 members – who are at various stages of their career within marketing – have access to:

• Over 5,000 interactive videos, eLearning assets, articles, and assessments, including aptitude tests and a Career Quiz,
• Interview360 - the AI-powered interview training tool to help members to optimise their performance for in-person and video interviews,
• CV Builder – a simple, step-by-step guide to create a professional, ATS-friendly CV to suit the individual’s skills and experience,
• CV360 - the professional CV scanner to support members with personalised, high-quality CV feedback,
• Cover Letter Builder – a quick and easy-to-use tool that provides best practice to create the ideal covering letter,
• The job search engine section and business networking tool, to enable members to take the starting steps or develop their marketing careers, by applying or simply learning more about relevant job roles.

“With the cost-of-living crisis, there’s additional pressure across the professional bodies sector to ensure that members are getting value for money, and that the monies spent is worthwhile. So, we invested in Access Career Development to help reinforce our offering to our members, as well as enable them to feel more confident, prepared, and equipped with the resource to take that step forward in their careers,” says Stu Kaley, Director of Customer Experience & Digital at the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

There are approximately 6,000 member users of the career development platform, who have completed nearly 50,000 learning and development activities over a three-and-a-half-year period.

“The career development platform has been well received amongst our professional members. We’ve seen consistent usage throughout and spikes in activity, which highlights the concurrent organic growth. The thousands of unique activities that have been completed highlights how much the content resonates with our members,” says Bryndley Walker, Public Relations Executive at Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Since launching the career development platform, the top trending eLearning resources for CIM members are around:

• Management
• Interviews
• Communication
• Personal brand
• Promotion

Discover the benefits a dedicated career development platform can bring to your organisation.

In addition to supporting the professional members, the CIM team have experienced numerous benefits since using Access Career Development, particularly with the job search engine.

“CIM is a relatively admin-heavy business, and we’re moving away from that. So, when we implemented Access Career Development, we immediately saw the benefits of the jobs manager as it’s significantly reduced the administrative burden on the team. This task is now simpler, quicker, and much more practical,” says Stu.

Prior to using Access Career Development, the Membership team would need to approve and upload job roles, manually checking and inputting all information. Any queries would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, which could be time-consuming.

Partner employers and recruiters can now easily upload vacancies to promote to professional members via the jobs manager tool. The timely, manual involvement from the CIM has notably decreased, as individual log-in credentials are created for employers and recruiters – at the CIM’s discretion. This allows job vacancies to be uploaded directly onto the platform. Once submitted for approval, the CIM can check and publish the vacancy posts in the Career Centre Manager.

Employers and recruiters also can create micro profiles to provide an overview into the company’s story, brand, development, and culture, etc. This provides the members with all the information needed to learn and apply for a role, so they don’t need to leave the platform to learn more – as the micro profile includes this – which in turn encourages activity to remain within the platform.

With all vacancies posted in one central location, the CIM, as well as partnering employers and recruiters, have access to analytics which demonstrate how many views each vacancy, how many members have applied for each role, etc. The analytics can be exported in report format, and filtered by industry, location, and key searching terms.

Employers can use reported insights to influence future strategies and make better-informed decisions to improve the effectiveness and appeal of job vacancies. This has meant that the CIM are no longer required to report back on each vacancy’s performance and engagement.

“The jobs manager has been an unexpected benefit to us. Initially, when we were in the market for software to enhance our membership offering, we assumed we would need to invest in additional third-party technology to support us from a job site perspective. There were concerns that all technologies would be isolated from one another and therefore inefficient, but also an additional expense associated with this which would need to consider,” says Stu.

As well as using the Career Centre Manager to approve job vacancies and run reports, it has also been useful for the development of the jobs board from an interaction and communications perspective. Admins can access this functionality to respond and communicate with employers and recruiters, as well as manage and keep records of correspondence.

From a member perspective, an exclusive collective of jobs are easily accessible to view and apply for, all from the one place.

Members can predefine role expectations and criteria, such as salary, location, job title, etc, and set daily email job notifications to ensure opportunities aren’t missed.

See Access Career Development in action to experience all the functionality to take careers to the next level.

The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform. 

The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.