So why has AIIM relaunched our core Certified Information Professional (CIP) certification?

Simple. We needed to do something about the ‘perfect storm.’

A storm of change

Over the past ten years, there has been a ‘perfect storm’ of change building. It’s a storm that’s driven by consumerisation, cloud, mobile, and the Internet of Things.

The point is the storm has changed how the world thinks about enterprise information and IT.

It also means we need to re-imagine the kinds of skills we all need to adapt and thrive in the light of these many changes.

After a lot of internal debate and extensive dialogue with our stakeholders, we decided to be proactive and do something positive to help. That’s why we have thoroughly reconfigured and redefined our central qualification of professional competence, the CIP, to meet the changing needs of today’s Information Age information professional.

Which means the CIP of 2016 and beyond will fully reflect the need for information workers to become digital leaders and will help in equipping them with the skills and experience to optimise information assets and transform business.

That’s quite amazing, as we only launched the first iteration of CIP certification in 2011. It’s great that in that 15 years it became known as one of the information industry’s most highly regarded professional qualifications – but telling that we’ve had to re-tool it so extensively.

The great news is that, as a result of all the behind-the-scenes work, we know CIP now accurately captures the body of knowledge necessary for information professionals to be successful in today’s digital economy.

CIP is available at locations around the world, and we’ve created a full set of training courses and materials to help any information professional prepare for the examination.

That digital leader can be you

We did all this because we need people able to provide guidance to the process people, technology people, and end-users that interact with content and information management systems.

That person also has to help the organisation think through what it means to manage information as a business asset in this era of digital transformation.

I believe that person is the information professional.

Peggy

Peggy Winton is interim President at AIIM, a global, non-profit organisation that provides independent research, education and certification programmes to information professionals and which has been an advocate and supporter of that sector for 70 years

AIIM has launched a free new eBook, Information Professionals: Where We Came From and Where We’re Going that looks in more detail at the new role of the Information Professional and has more information about becoming an AIIM Certified Information Professional.