Top of Mind

Nick McKissack is Chief Executive of HRNZ. Nick is passionate about people development and sharing the success of members and organisations leading the HR profession in New Zealand.

On being complimented for writing an erudite, entertaining and educational letter to a national newspaper, Mark Twain said, “Thank you. If I’d had more time, I would have written a shorter one”.

I’ve always enjoyed this quote although its attribution to Mark Twain is debated.

In a similar vein, I’m a great believer in Einstein’s ascending levels of intellect. The idea that simplicity is the highest level of intellect. If you’ve really understood something deeply, you will be able to explain it in few words.

I was pondering these ideas one day as I thought about our Chartered Membership process. We always have a lot of interest in chartering but receive many requests from Members for workshops, webinars and coaching to help them through the application process. Clearly, the need for this type of support suggests we have challenges with the simplicity of our process for our members.

With this in mind, we’ve recently made important changes to our Chartered Member application process to save Members from complexity and reduce the time it takes to complete an application. This doesn’t affect the standard that needs to be achieved to be awarded Chartered Membership, but it does remove the need for an advanced competency level in understanding HRNZ processes.

We’ve trialled this new approach with a couple of our Members, and we’re now ready to make it available to all Members. Over the next few months, we’ll be promoting this to Members in a campaign called ‘Get 5 Steps Ahead with HRNZ’. This is a reference to our much easier application process, which involves the following steps:

• completing the Code of Practice module on our eLearning platform

• updating your CV

• filling in a simple application form

• obtaining two referees

• submitting the application.

So, it’s a much more straightforward process. We’ve also set up a template to more simply obtain references via email and increased the size of our Chartered Assessment Panel to accommodate a higher number of applications.

We’re planning to offer whole HR teams the opportunity to go through this process together. Some teams will have a mix of Emerging HR Professionals along with those at Chartered Membership level, but the aim is to adopt professionalism at a consistent standard across the whole team.

We expect to receive a large number of Chartered Member applications over the coming months. We’ll be encouraging Members who have had their applications in the pipeline for some time to get to the front of the queue and submit their applications early.

Raising the professional status of HR practitioners in New Zealand remains a key objective for HRNZ. We’re hoping these changes remove obstacles for competent HR professionals when applying for Chartered Member status.

We’ve had Chartered Membership in place for a while now, so it’s good to have rewritten the story and, this time, we’ve made it a bit shorter.

Nick McKissack Chief Executive HRNZ Nick.McKissack@hrnz.org.nz