What is the CIPD profession map?

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)’s Profession Map aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date framework for HR and L&D professionals. This map replaced a previous version, which had been in use for over a decade.

The Profession Map establishes a standard for the human resources industry globally. Use it to advance your career, act with confidence, perform at your best, and influence change in your organisation. The Profession Map applies to everyone in the profession, whether they are CIPD members or not. The new map is based on four key principles: purpose and values, core knowledge, behaviours, and specialist knowledge.

Purpose and values

The fundamental purpose of the people profession is to champion better work and working lives. Creating roles, opportunities, organisations and working environments that help get the best out of people, delivering great organisational outcomes, in turn driving our economies, and making good, fair and inclusive work a societal outcome.

Why is the purpose important?

A shared purpose is crucial to sustaining a collective identity as a profession, as is an understanding of what’s important, what the CIPD stands for, and what they are striving to achieve. This is what has been distilled into the profession map.

This framework of shared principles and standards allows the profession to maintain and establish the trust and credibility it needs to impact change in the world of work.

By applying the Profession Map in your daily work, the profession collectively gains a higher degree of trust and credibility. From this position of trust, you will be able to have the greatest impact on practices in people and organisation development.

Core knowledge

The theory supporting the profession map was identified through academic research and input from all sectors of the profession, and it is represented by the core knowledge domains. Regardless of your role, industry, or area of specialisation, they are applicable to all professionals and lay out everything you need to know to be an effective practitioner.

To assist you in doing this, the CIPD has identified six essential knowledge areas that are necessary to influence change, add value, and have a good impact on the workplace:

• People practice
• Culture and behaviour
• Business acumen
• Evidence-based practice
• Technology and people
• Change

Core behaviours

Even under novel and difficult circumstances, there should be certain universal and consistent methods of thinking and behaving. This is exactly what the fundamental behaviours accomplish, explaining what it takes to be a successful people professional in a volatile workplace. The habits, which have a greater emphasis on moral and fact-based decision-making, have been identified through academic study and comments from experts across the industry. They mark a substantial shift for professionals.

To help you do this, the CIPD has defined eight core behaviours to empower you to create value for people, organisations, society, and our profession:

• Ethical practice
• Professional courage and influence
• Valuing people
• Working inclusively
• Commercial drive
• Passion for learning
• Insights focused
• Situational decision-making

Specialist knowledge

“The people profession is a broad and international community within which there are many specialisms. Together, this range of specialisms can help to shape successful organisations.”

Yetunde Hofmann, Leadership consultant and CIPD Board member

There are several opportunities in the human resources field. Regardless of your skill level, the specialised knowledge areas will show you how to use your knowledge to advance your career. This is where you can explore career paths and chart your progress through your selected areas of knowledge if you work in one of these fields or wish to deepen your skills for your own development.

To help you do this, the CIPD outlined nine specialist disciplines across HR, L&D, OD&D and beyond:

• Employee experience
• Employee relations
• Equality, diversity and inclusion
• Learning and development
• Organisation development and design
• People analytics
• Resourcing
• Reward
• Talent management
• Wellbeing

In general, organisations wishing to enhance their HR and L&D activities will find the CIPD Profession Map to be a thorough and useful resource. The map can help professionals and organisations to achieve their goals and generate positive outcomes by offering a clear framework for understanding the skills, knowledge, and behaviours required for success.

To learn about Bradfield's professional CIPD training courses, contact us, Give us a call at +971 4 440 5190, or alternatively, follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook to stay up to date.

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