A letter came through the door last week with a certificate from the CIPD marking 30 years since I first joined. Alongside inclusion in the HR’s Most Influential Hall of Fame, this was clear proof that I’m now old…a “veteran” as I’ve been described. Ouch.

Over the 30 years, I’ve never once hesitated paying my membership fees, because I value the work that the CIPD does. I know that might sound strange to some people who would expect me to criticise them (more of that later) but I genuinely believe they do an important job in a difficult context where it is hard to please everyone and sometimes even anyone. Like any long standing relationship, you have ups and downs. You tolerate things that used to irritate you and you get irritated by things you used to tolerate. But good relationships are based on honesty, constructive challenge and always wanting the other party to be better for themselves, not for you.

So let’s start with the good stuff. When I qualified the IPD had just been formed through the combination of the Institute of Personnel Management and the Institute of Training and Development. I became a GradIPD and I was genuinely proud, even more so in 2003 when that became the CIPD. Professional standards are important, particularly in a profession without the mainstream understanding of the law or accountancy for example. To this day, we put people through their CIPD qualifications in my organisation and it matters to them like it did to me. That chartered membership is a standard that should be championed and cherished in making the profession known and widely recognised.

Whilst the CIPD is at its best when it is championing high standards, it is at its worst when it starts to stray into social policy. The partnership with the High Pay Centre to champion “Fat Cat Monday” was frankly bonkers given the, at the time, very outspoken leadership of the HPC and something that anyone with half a brain should have understood placed its members in untenable positions with their remuneration committees. They’ve got themselves in a high profile mess over trans rights too, and their bias towards knowledge workers rather than the front line blue collar workers stems from a like of social, economic and intellectual diversity in their ranks. They have super bright people in the organisation, but I sometimes wonder whether there is a bit too much group think and a bit too little sense of strategic direction.

Over those thirty years we’ve had some fun too. Who can forget the imbecilic “Think HR, Think Again” marketing campaign. There was more “thought” in the strap line than there was in the conception of the ridiculous short lived campaign. There was the time in the early days of social media where they struggled a to get to grips with hashtags being used to drive feeds, leaving a few of us to swamp their website with irrelevant humorous content and being eventually given a stern dressing down by their social media team. And of course, the pièce de résistance when I managed to put a rather inappropriate message on the large screens at the 2014 People Management Awards (image below).

So 30 years in, CIPD it has been a blast. Keep championing better work, keep making people proud to qualify, remember our job is to drive the productivity of individuals, teams and organisations and not to tell people how to think or what to believe. And please, for the love of Buddha, don’t do another marketing campaign like that one. Here’s to…well not another 30 years, but who knows…maybe another 10.