Message from CEO & Chair and 2021-2022 Annual Report

Click here to view the full 2021-2022 Annual Report.

If you asked us to describe the past year at CPHR Manitoba, the word that comes to mind is “change.” As the exclusive certifying body in Manitoba for the CPHR designation, it is our job to guide business and support the health, safety, dignity and success of HR professionals and the people they serve day in and day out. So in 2021-2022, we worked through uncertainty, rose to the challenge, continued to guide business and embraced change to lead HR forward.

Like all other organizations, we continued to manage operations through another year of the pandemic, and like the first year, it was anything but predictable. The new evolution of pandemic management brought about new questions on how to operate and make key organizational decisions, especially around the delivery of our professional development programming. As a result, most of our programming remained virtual with some cautious returns to in-person activities.

The “Great Resignation” challenged us, like many organizations, to recruit new staff members in a more competitive hiring environment. For the first time, we had to replace a key management position on a temporary basis when long-term employee Laura Haines-Morrissette (Director of Marketing, Partnerships & Membership) went on maternity leave in February. We are thrilled for Laura, but those were big shoes to fill!

The CPHR Competency Framework continues to evolve as the profession evolves. We are seeing a domino effect of upcoming changes to the credentialing process to ensure the updated framework is reflected in the content of the National Knowledge Exam, Post-Secondary Accreditation Programs, the Validation of Experience, and the Continuing Professional Development requirement. It is, after all, best practice to update competency frameworks every five to seven years to ensure it continues to reflect the profession.

And through all these changes, we continued to move forward on our strategic plan:

Promoting the CPHR Brand

Investing in the promotion of CPHR is investing in the future of the profession. We continued to work with numerous strategic partnerships with the Chambers of Commerce throughout the province and other groups. We expanded our winter TV campaign to include Global Television and Bell Media TV stations. Our successful partnership with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers grew this year when we became the founding sponsor of their Employee Recognition Program.

We’re seeing results from our efforts reflected in the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce’s Business Outlook Survey:
• Awareness of the CPHR designation increased to 68% from 62% in 2019 and 52% in 20.
• Brand awareness is now 73% in Winnipeg, where many Manitoba companies are based.
• The likelihood of hiring a CPHR increased from 39% to 60%.

CPHR Manitoba members, designates and candidates are growing too:

• CPHR Membership increased by 2.85% to 1,737 members. This translates into a 27.35% increase since the 2014-2015 membership year.
• The number of CPHRs and CPHR Candidates are at an all-time high with 568 CPHR Candidates (an increase of 126) and 594 CPHRs.
• Our CPHR category grew for the second year in a row.

We remain focused on certification and the value of the CPHR designation. Now is the time to ensure HR maintains its place as a strategic organizational partner. Over the last year, we continued to invest time and resources into reaching potential CPHRs through LinkedIn Recruiter and ongoing student relations efforts at our partner post-secondary programs.

Supporting CPHR development

In place of the annual conference, we offered a virtual PD Passport Series, which ran from October to May and covered trending topics in HR. Over 375 delegates attended the five events.

Then, when it was safe to return to in-person events, we celebrated our HR Excellence Awards 2022 on June 1, 2022. Once again, we wish to congratulate all the nominees and winners!

In our ongoing efforts to support our members, we introduced new programming options focused on career development: Walk & Talk, Community Building Groups, Campus Ambassador Program, and a new developmental stream for our long-running Mentorship program.

We continued to partner with CPHR BC & Yukon to offer 19 webinars which drew 378 members. This partnership allows CPHR Manitoba to offer quality, relevant webinar programming to our members, which would be difficult for us to do with just our small team of staff.

This year, the number of members becoming CPHR Candidates via the NKE Waiver (115) outpaced those becoming CPHR Candidates by passing the NKE (87). We anticipate this trend will continue in the years to come due to the implementation of educational courses required to write the NKE as of January 1, 2022. We also saw a record number of VOE applications received at 47 with 25 passes.

Along with CPHR Canada, we announced the updated CPHR Competency Framework and a timeline for implementing updates to the NKE, VOE and accreditation program. Our staff will continue to work with national working groups to implement these changes in the years to come.

Fostering public confidence in CPHRs

We continued to work with government on moving our self-regulation submission forward despite two Minister changes resulting in three Minister contacts in a 12-month period. We are fortunate to have several Ministers eager to help us with this initiative.

Along with CPHR Canada, we introduced a mandatory ethics requirement as part of Continuing Professional Development and launched a free ethics course that CPHRs may take to meet the requirement.

As the voice of the Human Resource profession in Manitoba, we encourage Manitoba’s employers to enhance their diversity, equity and representation, and we support our members with tools and resources to affect positive change in their workplaces. While this has been the case for several years, we made it official this past year by introducing our Aspirational Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Statement.

As you may be aware, more than half our revenue came from non-member dues for many years. This is primarily made up of event revenues and the sponsorship sales that go with those events. This is a bit of an anomaly in the association industry and our board and staff identified this as a risk years ago. After all, learning budgets tend to be among the first things cut during a recession. The association is working towards a better balance between non-dues revenue and dues-based revenue by focusing on growing the membership and ensuring member dues keep up with inflation. Over the last couple years, we have achieved this balance and intend to maintain it going forward.

This better balance combined with the reserve that we continue to build has helped us weather the storm of the last couple of years. With an operating surplus of $67,838, the board has put another $75,000 into our internally restricted reserve bringing it to $500,000. Our target remains 100% of our annual operating budget.

Finally, we are pleased to share that our Members as Owners survey showed that CPHR Manitoba members are satisfied overall with the association and its offerings, including customer service (94% satisfaction) and board stewardship (95%).

Looking ahead

Next year, we will continue to build on our efforts to move the strategic plan forward.

We are working with a wide variety of strategic partners to connect with business leaders to increase awareness of CPHR and ensure they understand the value in hiring CPHRs.

To grow the membership, we are working with our post-secondary partners to build awareness of the CPHR designation and reaching out to current HR professionals who are not yet members.

A deeper focus on fostering pride in our CPHRs will see us expand our brand ambassadorship efforts from last year. Among the plans is a ‘toolkit’ to help our members promote their designation and speak credibly about the importance of being designated, why they (and others) are designated, and the importance of self-regulation. This provides another opportunity to educate members about professional designations and the evolving nature of designations to meet business demand.

In terms of program offerings, we are transitioning back to in-person signature events and evaluating a blend of in-person and virtual offerings for our conferences, workshops and other events.

Ensuring the credibility of the designation is paramount to ensuring the marketability of the designation. This means continuing to offer the NKE, NKE waivers and VOE intakes and ensuring CPD is up to date (with an audit of 3% of CPHRs) among other credentialing responsibilities. A special focus will be made to enhance the NKE student resources area and explore additional ways to support VOE applicants so they are prepared to complete the application.

At a national level, our involvement with CPHR Canada remains very active. We will participate in working groups to update the Validation of Experience (VOE), National Knowledge Exam (NKE) and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements stemming from last year’s Competency Framework update. CPHR Canada will also be evaluating the overall credentialing requirements from beginning to end and CPHR Manitoba will support these efforts.

Fostering public confidence in CPHRs involves being seen as a credible partner to the government and demonstrating credibility in the CPHR brand to the public. It is important to this strategic goal that we are seen to be regulating the profession. To that end, we will prioritize becoming self-regulated ahead of next year’s scheduled provincial election and revamp the public section of our website to make the complaints process clearer.

As we wrap up the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we want to thank the board of directors for their continued support and governance of this association; the volunteer committees for helping to keep programs and services moving forward; and our partners, sponsors and advertisers for their enthusiastic and unwavering support of our profession. We also want to thank our members for continuing to be great stewards of the profession. CPHR Manitoba would not be where it is today without the hard work of our staff. Thank you for your resourcefulness, creativity and dedication.

We look forward to continuing to advance the human resources profession in 2022-2023.

Sincerely,

Colleen Coates Chair, CPHR Manitoba Board of Directors	Ron Gauthier