AHRI CEO Lyn Goodear speaks of AHRI’s special relationship with the UK-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), and recounts her favourite insights from its chief executive Peter Cheese.

One of the pleasures of my job is getting around to all parts of the country to talk with our elected state councillors and our forum convenors. They come from a great variety of industries and locations, work at different levels within their organisations and are an invaluable source of information about what’s going on in the world they know.

 On top of that, I get to talk, from time to time, with HR leaders from other countries, mostly by telephone, but occasionally when I catch up with them at meetings of the Asia Pacific Federation of Human Resource Management or the World Federation of People Management Associations, AHRI being a member of both bodies.

A leader I speak with regularly is Peter Cheese. He’s the chief executive of the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The CIPD is much like AHRI, though considerably bigger with around 150,000 members.

It was with great pleasure that I was able to welcome Peter to Melbourne, where he spoke at our national convention in August on the HR challenges and opportunities with respect to the future of work.

While Peter spoke about artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics in workplaces, an observation he kept returning to was that workplaces don’t exist for the economy or for shareholders of companies, but for the good of the people they serve (their customers or clients) and for the people who work in them (their employees).

He spoke about staff working productively with their human and robot colleagues, but said some organisations view their people as ‘bad robots’. Not only do bad robots stop for lunch and take toilet breaks, they exercise their initiative, question the wisdom of decisions their managers make, and even speak out of turn when the occasion demands.

Peter is a great supporter of the role that emerging technologies can play in our workplaces, but he reminds us that HR practitioners have a singular responsibility to work with the leaders in their businesses “to make sure that the future of work is human and that we are designing workplaces that make the best of people, not just the best of clever technology”. I like that quote of Peter’s and borrow it from time to time.

AHRI is very fortunate to enjoy a special relationship with the CIPD in that we have both put into effect a robust HR certification standard. What they share in common is a vetting regime that assesses candidates according to exacting evidence of their professional HR knowledge, skills and behaviours.

I’m pleased to say that the National Certification Council has just added to those a fourth pathway, which acknowledges the critical role HR academics play in educating the practitioners of the future. Accordingly, AHRI certified academics will now be recognised alongside certified HR practitioners through our reciprocity agreement with CIPD, and we look forward to a continuing respectful relationship that includes mutual recognition of CIPD chartered members and AHRI certified members. In addition, we look forward to other relationships, as they arise, with countries travelling on the HR certification journey, both within our region and worldwide.

This article originally appeared in the October 2018 edition of HRM magazine.