Certified Performance Management Professional

Certified Performance Management Professional (CPMP) from the Institute for Performance Management is the designation carried by anyone who completes the Certificate in Performance Management and passes its exam. It exists to tell an employer something a CV cannot: that you have been assessed on managing other people's performance, against a syllabus someone else approved.

How it is earned

Complete the course and pass the online exam. The pass mark is 70% and you have up to six attempts, so it is a genuine threshold rather than a formality, but nobody fails for want of a second try. Passing issues a digital certificate.

There are no prerequisites. You do not need an existing qualification or a minimum number of years in management to enrol.

What the holder has demonstrated

That they can align what an individual is measured on with what the organisation is trying to achieve. That they can write goals and objectives that survive contact with real work, OKRs included. That they can prepare for and conduct an appraisal, including 360 degree feedback and self review. That they can diagnose underperformance objectively, separating a capability problem from a motivation problem from an objective that was badly set in the first place. And that they understand what builds a culture of performance rather than an annual reporting ritual.

Who takes it

Managers and supervisors with direct reports or a team, in business and industry rather than government or the public sector. It suits managers in fast growing companies particularly, where the systems that worked at twenty people start failing at two hundred.

Delivery

Fully online, including the exam. About ten hours of study made up of video tutorials, written case studies and ebooks, and you have up to six months from purchase to finish.

Judging it for yourself

The free trial module opens one module in full before you pay anything, and the syllabus is published in full. The course is USD 950 with a full refund inside 30 days.

The syllabus was reviewed and approved by an Industry Advisory Council of nine senior business leaders at organisations including IBM, BP, Dell, HP and Fujitsu, which is the part that makes the designation mean something outside this website.