(CMI) Chartered Management Institute

The Background

The Chartered Management Institute is the UK's only chartered professional body that is dedicated to management and leadership. It is committed to raising the performance of business by championing management. The Institute achieves this by supporting and advising individuals and organisations or through engaging policy makers and key influencers in government and the management profession.

It has over 70,000 individual members and 400 corporate members.

It is both a membership body and an awarding body. Managers studying for qualifications automatically become studying members of CMI and get a user name and password to access the CMI's comprehensive on line learning resources which include:

• Online access to over 200 management journals
• CMI's own online library or articles and fact sheets about different management topics related to the programmes
• Ability to borrow management books selected online and sent through the post

Student members also receive the CMI magazine Professional Manager and get invited to local CMI networking events.

At the end of the programme, delegates can choose to upgrade to full CMI membership and if they wish go on to become Chartered Managers.

If you would like to know more about the CMI have a look at www.managers.org.uk or phone them on 01536 204222.

CMI - Approach to Assessment

As you might expect, CMI is quite rigorous in its approach to assessment requiring careful evidence that learning outcomes have been met. On paper, CMI is more than prepared to be flexible about what is used to assess learning outcomes, but in practice it has proved difficult to be flexible about assessment on the one hand and demonstrate rigorously that learning outcomes have been met on the other, so assessment tends to be written reports of varying length according to which level of qualification.

CMI is also less flexible when it comes to group work and assessment.

CMI - Our personal view

Of the three awarding bodies, CMI come across as highly professional, and certainly set and police high standards in terms of what delegates need to do to gain the qualification. Of the three lengths of course, the demands placed by CMI for Award and Certificate are less than the other two and very flexible in that you can choose any units you like. However for the Diploma length courses, the constraints are much tighter. This is because of their chartered status - Diploma is the benchmark qualification for becoming chartered and they want to maintain more control over that.

Customer service gurus take note, one way in which we judge the effectiveness of the awarding bodies is how responsive they are when it comes to dealing with our requests as a customer. We find CMI to be excellent with good support from the central admin team and from our external verifier.

CMI - Units offered

Below is a table showing the CMI units offered at each of First Line, Middle and Senior Management levels.

Alongside each one is a Credit value (Cr). The second row shows how many credits are required to make up each of A - Award, C - Certificate, D-Diploma

At Diploma level in each case, some units are compulsory and some are an either/or choice. These are indicated by C= required at that level, E/O = an "either/or" choice between two.

Please click here to download this table as a PDF.

CMI - Syllabus Content

To see the content and learning outcomes behind each unit at each level, please download the relevant one of the following:

• CMI Level 3 Syllabus document
• CMI Level 5 Syllabus document
• CMI Level 7 Syllabus document