Janet Sperstad Talks About the Importance of Certification

Certification Update: MPI Refines CMP As NBTA Readies Mark

October 21, 2009
By Seth Harris
Successful Meetings.com

Meeting Professionals International and the Convention Industry Council last month announced plans to alter the Certified Meeting Professional designation from a North American to a global standard.

Meanwhile, the National Business Travel Association next month is launching its Strategic Meetings Management Certification, which is aimed at providing professionals with the training to, among other skills, manage data measurement, procurement and risk mitigation, standardize processes and lead a team of meeting planners.

The move to create meetings industry designations comes at a time when planners find themselves needing to justify their roles by broadening their assets and demonstrating the value they bring to their organizations.

"Certifications really are the underpinnings and the foundational structure of the body of knowledge of what we do," according to Janet Sperstad, lead instructor for the Madison Area Technical College and a former consultant and Aerial Co. and Monsanto corporate planner. Sperstad launched the first U.S. collegiate degree program in meeting and event management in 2002. "When employers look at hiring someone, for the end user to have either degrees or certifications really helps transfer from the whole industry what a meeting professional is and what the meeting profession is."

Meeting Professionals International is contributing $150,000 and other resources over the next several months to work with the Convention Industry Council in changing the CMP application, curriculum and exam to a more country-neutral format, according to MPI chief development officer Didier Scaillet.

The current format is English-only and built for North American professionals. Those factors hinder even those international professionals with decades of experience from earning enough application points to qualify for the exam.

"In order to qualify to take the CMP exam, the number of points were linked to speaking, volunteerism and writing opportunities," Scaillet said. "A lot of these opportunities do not exist in other parts of the world. We were faced with a situation where a director of convention sales for a hotel in Singapore with over 20 years of experience in the industry could not qualify for the CMP exam."

Of the 14,000 professionals who have earned the CMP designation since the program launched in 1985, only 200 are outside of North America, according to CIC CMP program director Christina Buck.

The interest from international planners in the CMP is growing as the industry pours development into Africa, Asia/Pacific and the Middle East. As a result, Scaillet said new convention centers and hotel properties are looking to bring a new sense of discipline that could put their practices on par with the rest of the world.

"The whole industry is really getting a huge amount of traction, but all of these venues and new centers and the demand that goes with it, they want to make sure that they're on par with international standards," he said. "The standards are defined by the most mature industry in our field, which is the U.S. one."

To provide educational hubs for the CMP and MPI's other designation programs, the Certification in Meetings Management, the Global Certificate in Meetings and Business Events and the in-development Executive Leadership Program, the association has partnered with four universities to house global training centers.

NBTA's SMMC program begins its inaugural class of about 20 participants on Nov. 2 in Atlanta following more than a year of development with a task force of 14 corporate planners, consultants and suppliers, many of whom were not then members of NBTA.

The curriculum, which spans two weeks, consists of 11 core programs including strategic sourcing, data analysis, technology and policy compliance and development. Among other requirements, program candidates are required to have at least seven years of professional experience or a college degree and at least four years of professional experience.

While the CMP program focuses on the logical and tactical functions of planning a meeting, the SMMC is tailored for anyone within an organization who finds themselves managing an entire program's expenditure.

"In a major corporation there typically is one travel manager," said SMMC development lead Kari Kesler, who also is president and chief strategist of KK Strategic Solutions. "They may have a team of people who work for them, but there is a single travel manager. They don't book individual travel for anybody in their company. They run the standards, policy and strategy, and work with procurement on savings, efficiencies and return on all the money they are spending. It's the same thing with strategic meetings managers. There typically is one in a major corporation and they never plan a meeting."

In the SMMC construction process, the task force worked with Sperstad to determine whether there was any overlap with other designations.

"We wanted to make sure that we could accurately market the value proposition of SMMC and that it was different," Kesler said. "I thought planners would be interested in taking the SMMC, but it's not a planner certification at all."

Convention Industry Council COO Karen Kotowski said the CMP designation is "geared toward folks who are working in corporations in the procurement area that do large-scale contracts with hotels and providers of services. The Certified Meeting Professional designation is really for the professional on the front lines who is doing the actual logistics and planning of the program, as well as it is open to suppliers on the convention services side, hotel or convention center or sales end."

Although the SMMC targets a different audience, during its development there were some who saw it as competition to the CMP.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," Kesler said. "Within NBTA, I've been there the whole time with everything we've done with groups and meetings, and we've never said, let's do something, build a program, write a paper, build a certification to compete. That's not how we work."