 And I'd like to introduce today's Marguest Lecturer, it's Jesse Wilkins. You see he also is a CRM and an IGP, you hear us talk about that quite often, but he also has the CIP designation. And that's what we're going to hear about this evening. Jesse is the Director of Professional Development for AIME, very familiar with the exam because he's instrumental in creating training materials for the exam. So I'm going to not take any more time and turn the mic right over to Jesse so that he could tell us all about the CIP. Thanks Pat. And thanks everybody for having me. I'm really glad to have the chance to talk about the CIP. It's kind of been a labor of love of mine for coming up on six years now. As Pat said, I helped write the original CIP and we did an update last year and I helped with that too. And so what I'd like to do tonight is kind of talk a little bit about what it is and the need that we saw in the marketplace, how we decided to address that need and then really sort of dive into the meat of what the CIP covers. In 2010 or so, the market was a little bit in turmoil. We had people who were specialists in their particular areas who were deep dive records managers, librarians, archivists, IT, whatever type of information type discipline you can think of. We had people who spoke those very well and who knew their jobs very well. The problem is that they couldn't talk to each other. We had silos in process, silos of information, repositories and too often people didn't understand what was going on. Well independently from us, Gartner also saw a similar problem and they wrote a CIO alert called you need information professionals and you see the quote that I extracted from that here. After about a nine month process, which I'll describe here shortly, what we ended up with is something for which the objective was to allow information professionals to demonstrate their competence at a number of information management related tasks. And I think importantly, it drew from a broad based body of knowledge such that this wasn't somebody who was going to be a deep dive expert necessarily at everything because who is. But instead would provide them with that solid grounding that Jack of all trades if you will, that had deep dive expertise in certain areas and then broader expertise and understanding of the bigger picture in all of these other areas. There's a term for this in the HR community called T-shaped, being T-shaped or being a T-shaped individual. And that's exactly what it is. The base of the T is your deep dive expertise in a particular area such as archives and records administration and then the broad grounding and understanding and ability to recognize frankly when you're out of your depth in an area and you need to call that deep dive expert. And so the task before us really was to identify what's that CIP look like? What is the broad stroke of the T that we expect everybody to understand about records management, about knowledge management, about all these other disciplines? So we think that CIP does kind of help bridge that gap. Every year when I go to the ARMA conference or when I go to spring seminars it seems like there's always a session on records in IT, bridging the gap or IT in business bridging the gap. Well, we think that CIP kind of does that because it gives you a grounding in best practices or at least defensible practices across a variety of information management disciplines. In the original CIP exam we actually had 32 separate knowledge areas that we covered. Everything from enterprise search, business intelligence, all the way to project management planning and implementation. And so as we looked at the development of this we knew that it had to be broad and really provide that grounding so that people could understand. Again, what are the things that I need to understand to do my job and what are the things I need to understand about other people's jobs either to do mine or to help them with theirs? So the process we used is as with any certification, you have to get a bunch of subject matter experts across a variety of disciplines, across a variety of geographies because those speak two different sorts of privacy and data protection and compliance types of regimes. And we used that to develop this body of knowledge. And that was the original CIP and it launched September 23rd of 2011. It was fairly successful as these things go. Certifications are always slow on the uptake because nobody knows if there's going to be any value to it until people have it. It's a bit of a chicken in the egg. In 2016 we decided that it had been five years, industry had changed, technologies had changed, best practices had changed. And so we undertook to update it in 2016 using new subject matter experts again from a variety of disciplines. And we did a rigorous psychometric valid defensible process which I'll speak to in just a moment. Part of the value of the CIP and any other certification is that it demonstrates an individual's commitment to professional development because unlike other types of programs you have to do continuing education. You can't just pass the exam in 2017 and 50 years later you're still a CIP. As with most other certifications there is a continuing education requirement. I don't think it's too onerous to ask a professional in the industry to do 15 hours of continuing education a year. And so that's what we said it at. Many other certifications in the industry are around that same number. The certified records manager, for example, is 20 hours a year and it's a five-year period. So as we built this one of the key questions that we had to address initially and on an ongoing basis is who's the audience for this? And it's probably not CIOs and it's probably not everybody in your organization although since I have the ultimate profit and loss responsibility for it I'd love that. But as a matter of practice what we think is that anybody who is an information professional and you see some of the job titles here this is by no means an exhaustive list PowerPoint only goes so many before it's unreadable. But anybody who has responsibility for an information-centric process that certainly includes IT, that certainly includes knowledge managers, archivists, knowledge workers, anybody who's dealing with information, especially digital information. We think is a good candidate for this. Legal folks, I don't know that a whole lot of lawyers have taken it although I know a few that have but certainly I've seen a number of paralegals and law clerks who have taken the CIP and done very well at it. Consultants, in fact consultants have done amazingly well at this and I think part of the reason for that is that for most successful consultants who have been in the industry any period of time you've had to learn a lot about a lot of different things almost by default. The records management consultant has also been a project manager and has also had to deal with metadata and has also had to deal with enterprise search. So consultants have been especially successful at this but really it's anybody who has to either manage an information-centric process or has to serve as a liaison between them. So here's the process and again this is the same process that you would follow with any sort of formal certification in the industry. The first step is to validate the need for the thing. You validate the need in the marketplace to create it or to update it to develop a new flavor of it. To develop a specialty or a specialization and then you run that by key stakeholders because ultimately we have to understand who the audience is for it and what we hope to get out of it. Is there a licensure thing that we're going to try and go after and with most certifications at least in the United States that's not the case. Is it something that we hopefully people to get better jobs, better paying jobs of course. Those sorts of things. Once we've kind of got that stake in the ground we then used existing CIPs and asked them you know the foundational question. What's a CIP got to do today in 2016? What's in your job and maybe more importantly what's not part of the job because there's only so much you can put on a certification right. So early on we made the decision that paper and hard copy physical media was out of our scope. There's lots of great resources for that. The CRM covers it, the IGP covers it a little bit, but that's outside of our remit. Print stream processing, engineering drawing management, geographic information systems. There's there are a lot of things out there that we felt were specialized enough that we didn't want to spend any questions on that if that makes sense. An exam only has X number of questions and so however that the broader the exam is the more questions you have to have the longer it is the more trying it is. And so we made the intentional decision that here are the boundaries of what go on the CIP and I'll show you that here in just a second. So we asked these CIPs what's the CIP need to know? How important is it to know that? And then we assigned a waiting and you'll see that in just a second. Once we have the outline done then we were able to start writing exam questions. If you've never had to do this in a formal setting, writing a good, clear, articulate, perfectly correct exam question is as much art as it is science because for a good certification and for it to be defensible and sound you can't use things like true or false. You can't use all of the above or none of the above. If you can't use fill in the blanks the distractors which is the wrong answers have to be believable. And so for example we gave a question that said an organization has determined that for a certain type of record series that it maintains it has conflicting retention requirements of three years, five years, seven years and 12 years. What is the correct retention period for that record series according to their retention schedule? Everybody who doesn't know records management picks seven because we all keep records for seven years, right? Some people will pick the shortest number. A few people will pick the five years just because it's random. But somebody who knows that with almost very few exceptions throughout the world longest retention period wins. You have to keep stuff as long as the longest retention period and so the correct answer there is 12. But again part of the thing is making sure that the answer is correct in every case or in every foreseeable case according to current law. And part of it is also in turn making sure that the distractors are plausible so that ideally the people who know the subject matter get it and it's a breeze and the people who don't know the subject matter very well don't pass. I mean that's the whole point of the certification. And there's a lot of math that goes into that which I'll talk about here in just a second. So we wrote these exam questions. We developed two separate exam forms. And so if you take the CIP and are not successful and you take it again, you're going to get a different test. Within the test, the questions themselves and the responses are randomized. This doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult for the candidate but it does make it a whole lot more difficult to cheat. That is if I have a room of 30 people who are all taking the CIP exam for an on-site proctored exam, there's no way for them to copy off of each other because even if all 30 started the test at the exact same moment, their question number one is statistically all of them are going to get different question number ones. And even if two of them get the same question number one, statistically they'll all get question number two different. So we built the test exam. We did a beta process. And then the way that the exam process works is we got every candidate's answer for every question and we got the candidate's results as a whole. And so 100 questions, beta exam, candidate A got 60 questions right, candidate B got 90 questions right. And we know what they answered on their question number one, two, three, four, five, which candidate number one had his question number one, candidate two had his question number 29. Okay. And then what we did is a whole lot of math that basically said an item performs better when the person who got the test right, got that question right, and the person who did poorly on the test got that test wrong. And this is a psychometric analysis is the term for it. And basically it's used to make sure that we're writing good questions. That we don't have questions that have multiple right answers. We don't have questions where the answer is simply flat out wrong, where the answer is supposed to be A and we inadvertently coded it as B, et cetera. So it's a significant quality control step. And then we used CIP candidates, some of whom who had taken the beta test, some who hadn't. And we asked them the question, how difficult do you find this question? And how important do you find it to your job? Okay. So that gave us two additional qualitative factors. And at the end of all of that, what we ended up with is the current CIP exam. As part of that, there's a mathematical process by where you get a passing score. You don't just throw a dart at a dartboard, or hey, it's 70%. There's a lot of math involved, and it goes into what the percentages of people that you want to pass, how well they scored on the different forms, how do we equate the scores between the forms. And what we ended up with is a passing score of 60%. That is you need a 60% or higher on the CIP to pass. That actually ranks it as a fairly difficult exam in the certification community. Many exams such as the CRM, IGP, the CIPP exams, I think, are all around 70 to 75%. PMI doesn't even publish their passing score anymore, but at one point it was below 50%. And it's widely acknowledged as one of the most difficult IT and information industry exams out there. So what we ended up with, it's a two-hour proctored exam. That is you have to go to a test center and sit down and no references and no resources, and you take the exam and two hours later it's all over, but the shouting. It's 100 multiple-choice questions, and it's all electronically scored. It's available year-round. There's no test window. If you register for it, you could take it. Depending on your test center, we're pretty late in the week to take it this week, but you could take it next week as long as you're prepared for it. Criterion is our test provider, and they have test centers around the world. When I took the beta, because I took the beta myself, my test center was about 15 miles away from me, but it was still, you know, not too bad. In certain conditions, we can also proctor it on site. For example, at the AEM conference last month in Orlando, we did a CIP preparatory workshop on the Monday the conference opened, and then Tuesday morning we had 25 people in a room, and I proctored the exam. And we checked IDs, and nobody could talk, and nobody could copy off of each other, and but that's not as frequent. Usually you have to go to a test center. Once you pass, the certification is valid for three years, and then you have to recertify to maintain it. You can always retest. Retesting is more expensive unless you're a very good test taker, it tends to be a bit more nerve-wracking. And so I would argue that the easier route, and the route that most people take for most certifications, is to do continuing education credits. Fifteen credits per year for three years. You can attend a webinar. This webinar counts, by the way Pat, this webinar counts if anybody needs it, who is the CIP. But any event from any source, including vendor sponsored events, counts, as long as it's educational and relates to one of the topics on the CIP. So we had a CIP who wanted credits for attending a genealogy conference, and obviously we didn't give them full credit for a genealogy conference. Genealogy is not one of the topics on the CIP. But there was a topic on how to search certain digital archives for certain types of information. And so we did give them credit for that. There were two other sessions. I ended up giving that person three credits for attending this conference that they would have attended anyway. We routinely give credits for academic courses, as long as you pass them. We give credits for, again, vendor meetings, it does have to be educational, is the primary requirement. So the question that I get a lot is how does CIP compare to insert credential here? How is CIP compared to the ICRM? How is it compared to our AEM certificate courses? How is it compared to the ARMA IGP? And I think the short answer is we don't believe that it's competitive. Instead, we believe that it's complementary. And so let me sort of walk into what I mean by that. For those of you not as familiar with the CRM, and I'm sure some of you are, the CRM exam is six exams. Part one is on management. Part five is on technology. I forget what parts two and three and four are. And then you have to pass all five of those parts, very in-depth, very detailed about the nuances of how to do not just records management, mail room management, repro management, management theory, setting up a records center, disaster recovery, business continuity, microfilm, all these different areas. And then there's a part six, which is a case study. Okay? So at the end of the CRM process, the presumption is that you're pretty solid in your grounding of a lot of different areas of records management theory and practice. Same thing with the PMP, the project management professional for project management. People who pass the PMP exam are generally considered to be pretty good project managers. Now, that's not a guarantee of efficient results in the actual workforce, but we as certification developers, the entire point is that this is a shorthand by which you can at least presume that somebody knows what they're doing until you find otherwise. And so that's why people go after these certifications. Again, be it ours, be it other ones, be it Microsoft certifications. Training courses like the AEM certificate programs, the ARMA certificate program, certificates from continuing education centers at universities. They tend to be the same thing. They're very narrow, very deep dives in a fairly specialized area of expertise. And they also tend to be biased to the developer's view of the world. Now, when we develop the AEM certificate courses, I developed the electronic records management course. We use ISO 1549, the global standard for records management. We use resources from ARMA and from AEM and from the National Archives of the U.S., the National Archives of the U.K., et cetera. So they are somewhat standards-based. But at the end of the day, our exam is based on our course. If you go to the narrow federal records certificate program, it's based on how they do federal records management according to whoever is running the place. Is that going to be the same this year as it was 10 years from now? Probably not for a variety of reasons. But the exam and the training materials are closely, closely aligned, whereas for a formal certification, the alignment is more between the exam and the job skills that are required. Obviously, we try and develop training materials to bridge that gap, but there is a little bit of a difference there. What this means in any event, whether we're talking about our certificate programs or the certifications you see listed or others, is that they tend to end up in silos. Again, records management focuses on records management. The archivists focus on archives. The knowledge management team focuses on knowledge management. And again, this is important, and this is helpful for most organizations' success, but we believe it's not sufficient. Because what ends up happening is IT all too often selects a system either based on what the business thinks they need, which is not often what they need, or based on an exchange that they had with a vendor at a conference. Vendors want to solve your problems, but vendors also want to sell you solutions. And so, I can't tell you how many times I've had students in my ERM classes or records managers who say, yeah, we got SharePoint. One day, IT surprised us and said, hey, we got SharePoint. You're moving all your stuff into it in 30 days. That's not the right way to do it. But IT didn't know any better. Records managers went to the MERC conference and said, hey, this solution by insert vendor name here seems pretty good. We should get it and come to find out that IT can't support it because it's based on an Oracle back end and they're using Microsoft SQL Server. So, a lot of these discussions and challenges happen in organizations all the time because, you know, like a horse with blinders on, you can only see what's, well, that's a bad analogy. The point is that you get so deep and so detailed into what you're doing that you kind of can't see the force for the trees. And so, this notion of bridging the gap, this T-shaped individual, that's what we think where the CIP works. And so, it's not CIP or CRM. It's CIP and CRM so that you have that deep dive in records management, that deep dive in archives, that deep dive in librarianship, but you also understand how that relates to all of the other knowledge areas within your organization, those information-centric processes. And so, we do make CIPs understand a little bit about workflow and business process management. We do make them understand a little bit about email management and other communications technologies. It's 2017, so we do require them to demonstrate a certain amount of understanding of social, mobile, cloud, consumer-based IT, bring your own device. All of these challenges that organizations are already starting to struggle with and some of them have been struggling with for years and years and years. I mean, we've been dealing with email management for 30 plus years and with email itself for over 40 years and yet, you know, organizations still struggle with it. And so, basically the way we position it is that the deep dive is the deep dive and CIP kind of gives you the broader picture. Now, the other question I get that's closely related is, what about the I.G.P.? This is ARMA certification that came about at the same time as ours, like ours, they position it as sort of a very broad-based certification. If you see the first slide or the last slide, I have that as well. And so, I think I'm not talking too much out of school when I say they are similar in some ways and that both of them are very broad. I would add that one of the distinctions though is that at least in my mind, information governance is a little bit more strategic. It's a little bit more, I don't know if foundational is the right term, but it's more strategy-focused. Information belongs to the organization. It's an asset that has value. It needs to be managed appropriately, et cetera, et cetera. And then, within that broad information governance framework, we believe that records management is a practice in a discipline and a tactic. Knowledge management is a practice in a discipline and a tactic. All of the areas that we cover on the CIP are themselves, practices, disciplines, and tactics that align to I.G.P. And so, we started to see quite a few people in the industry who have gotten, you know, the sort of the big three, the CRM and the CIP and the I.G.P. There's an awful lot of CIP's and I.G.P's out there because they see the value of the broadness of the I.G.P from a strategy perspective and the broadness of the CIP from a tactics and processes perspective. Okay. Let me switch gears a little bit and talk about the actual CIP exam. You see it on the screen. We've organized the exam into six separate domains. The weighting refers to how many questions from that domain are on each form of the exam. Every single question counts the same amount of weight. Basically, your passing score is roughly an hour just to how many questions you get right. So, there are 20 questions on creating and capturing information, 10 questions on automating information, that's our BPM. Records management is covered fully within domain five, among other things. There's no penalty for guessing. It is the number of questions you get right ultimately. So, now let's dive into each of these into just a little bit more detail. The first domain, creating and capturing information covers everything related to capture. Historically, capture has often referred to paper scanning, document imaging, digitization, whatever you choose to call it. And that's certainly well represented in the CIP. But we also have bulk import of information. For example, from a file share cleanup or a legacy system decommissioning and migration. We have capture of born digital documents. This is where we address capture of email and other communications technologies and how to manage them more effectively. And, of course, this is also where we talk about collaboration. Primarily, though not exclusively, document-centric collaboration. And we do tell people about other different ways that you can collaborate, different types of things that need to be concerned with in terms of collaborating, especially outside the organization. Those types of things. Just pulling this up on my screen to make sure I'm not missing any of the topics there. This is where we talk about file formats. This is where we talk about capturing structured data. One of the key challenges that we often see is how to capture and manage throughout its life cycle structured data. And what's the right file format to select based on business requirements, right? When is PDF best? And the short answer is frequently, but not always. When are other types best? And ultimately, how do you apply governance to all of these different types of content, structured and unstructured, different types of file formats, et cetera? domain 2, organizing and categorizing information. This is where we deal with classification. Now, we use the term categorization as opposed to classification. It's a distinction as well as a difference, and it's a meaningful difference. But the reason we chose to use categorization as opposed to classification is because a not insignificant part of our audience deals with security-classified information, secret, top secret, that sort of thing. And so when we say organizing and classifying information, what they immediately think is of classified, you know, top secret stuff, and that is a part of it. We don't expect the typical test taker to have any familiarity with that. And so that's why we chose categorizing. But for all intents and purposes, we're referring to both the creation of categories that would go into a controlled vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, et cetera, an ontology even, and then how to apply things to them, how to sort into the appropriate buckets. So in this area, we also talk about metadata, search, and eDiscovery. And eDiscovery we use as the generic term to also refer to things like Freedom of Information Act. So we talk about how to capture metadata, how to apply it, different ways to improve the quality of it through things like controlled vocabularies and data validation, the various benefits of doing certain types of metadata capture versus others, the benefits of different types of categorization and classification schemes, lists versus hierarchies versus facets, even including folksonomies. And we do talk a little bit about different findability mechanisms, both in terms of search broadly and also in terms of more enterprise search types of techniques and capabilities. So in three, information governance, governing information. In this, we look at all of the different things that need to go into an effective information governance program, framework, strategy, and all the moving parts that are needed to affect that, basically. Again, this is not intended to out IGP, the ARMA IGP. However, I think we used a lot of similar resources and so there is a certain amount of alignment, right? Information governance is information governance. The appropriate stakeholders are going to be very similar for a given type of information governance program at a given level of information governance maturity. The types of activities that you would do in terms of monitoring and auditing are going to be very similar. There will be a lot of nuances to figure out for your particular organization, but the need to do them will be consistent across organizations. Domain 4, automating information intensive processes. This is really business process management and workflow. And really, that's the two key pillars of this. And so, we spend about half of our questions in that domain on process analysis, how to gather information, the types of information to gather, the things that a business analyst would do. Flow charting, how to flowchart a process, some of the different things that you can do once you've got a flow chart in terms of analysis, how to convert that into a process model and why you would want to do that. And then we get into a little bit of the enabling technologies. And again, CIP is very vendor neutral. We don't mention a single vendor in the entire exam, not even SharePoint. But we do note that there's a class of tools called business activity monitoring. And this is kind of what they do and what their value is. There are differences between routing and workflow and transactional content management. And we expect the CIP to understand some of those nuances. Again, 60 percent is what you need to get to pass. So, you could miss every single BPM question and still pass. We'd hope you wouldn't do that, but it happens. All right. Domain five, near and dear to many of you, I suspect. Managing the information lifecycle. This is largely our records management domain. And we cover the steps in the information lifecycle. The purpose of capturing records and distinguishing them from non-records, what vital records are, the challenges with capturing and managing different sorts of information through their short-term lifecycle. And then, of course, since we're talking about digital preservation as well, through the long-term lifecycle as well. It's not at all uncommon for certain types of records to have retention periods that are decades, centuries, or even millennia in cases of certain types of nuclear-based records. And so, I don't purport, and we don't purport to test how you're going to read these records in 10,000 years. Frankly, I'm not sure we're there yet. But certainly, there are proven techniques for how to be able to read information in 10, 20, 50, 100 years. And we make, we have questions on the exam that deals with those, both in terms of generalities and in terms of specific strategies and techniques such as migration, digital emulation, and the like. We also note the importance of standards in open standards and standard-based, open standard-based file formats and storage media as an effective mechanism towards long-term digital preservation. This is also where we talk about knowledge management. And frankly, that's because we couldn't figure any place else to put it, and we knew we needed it. So, we had a lot of discussion about where collaboration would go and where knowledge management would go, and ultimately, this is where they ended up. But on the exam, it doesn't go in order, it's all randomized anyway, so it doesn't matter. Okay, and last but not least, we have implementing and information management solution. This is really where we get into the nuts and bolts of developing a program and selecting and implementing a technology solution. But there's an awful lot more to it than just simply buying something and flinging it over the wall. And this, we think, is an important topic for CIPs to understand and be able to impress upon their organizations, that they need to understand the needs of the organization, that the business is in the business of the business, whether you're a business or public sector doesn't matter. You have a mission and information management, information governance, all of the stuff that we're talking about on the CIP ultimately has to support that. And so, we require on as part of the CIP exam that candidates demonstrate some understanding of that, that they identify the roles and responsibilities associated, that they understand how to do a baseline organizational assessment so that they can understand where you're at with respect to existing systems, existing processes, existing techniques, existing policies and procedures, what needs to change, what needs to be developed from scratch, where are the types of resources that you can go to to find that information if you're not lucky enough to be part of a formal academic program like this. So, we expect them to understand how to identify what they've got in place, where they need to get to and what that gap is. And then, once they've figured out what that gap is, what's the right thoughtful, systematic, methodical approach to address and sometimes that's hardware and software. Oftentimes, it's process redesign, it's policies, it's training people on policies and processes and then enforcing their adherence to policies and processes. I have to say, having been involved with a number of implementations over my career before I joined AIM, most information management programs fail not because the technology is bad or even because it was implemented poorly. It's because it's not a good fit for what the business needs were and because nobody used it and they didn't use it for a variety of reasons because they weren't trained on it, they didn't understand it, it was too complex, there's lots and lots of reasons. And all of these are covered in this domain. We also cover in this domain key things around metrics and measuring the efficacy of the program, not just data metrics but other sorts of metrics and making sure that we realize the benefits that we expect to accrue from this type of program. And possibly the most important thing, change management, which again is not just training, it's not just sending out an email blast, it's having a formal program in place that says we're going to start this initiative and here's how we're going to raise awareness and prepare people for change. And we're doing the project and here's how we're going to get the end users involved and the stakeholders involved and keep everybody informed. And now we're at implementation and the tasks change and now we're at go live and the tasks change. And so it's again, it's a comprehensive systematic methodical approach. So that's it for the exam. Six domains, you do not have to pass every single domain of the exam. You have to answer 60 questions right more or less. You need to get an aggregate score of 60.00% on the exam to pass. So for anybody that's interested in it and I'm happy to talk with you individually afterwards via email if you are. But the next steps that we would assume most candidates would take is you schedule the exam, right? You go to criterion's website and you schedule the exam. You prepare for the exam and then the day of it you take it and hopefully you pass it. And so I'm going to talk about each of these steps now in a little bit more detail. To register for the exam, again, it's proctored by criterion and so you can use the link that I have on the screen and it will ask you first to search by country and then in many countries by state, province or prefecture and then it will show you exam centers within, I want to say it's 100 mile radius by default. We have about 10 of them in the greater Denver metropolitan area. I'm certain that in the greater San Jose metropolitan area, there's got to be a dozen of them. But we've had them in Nigeria. We've had people take the test in Israel, in Russia, in France, in Brazil. I think we're at 33 countries right now where CIPs are represented. That's not where you go to register though. You go to register at the second and you have to create an account and then you select your, you will then move into the Locate Test Center. You select your date, time and location. You pay the fee if it's applicable. And then you wait and you prepare and you study and you know get good sleep the night before and don't go drinking the night before, et cetera, et cetera. Take the exam and it's instant gratification. The second that your exam closes and the proctor logs you out, your score will be generated on the screen, both your overall score and your by domain score and then you will be able to assess your next steps. We have a number of study resources. Some of these are free, some of them are not free. But I don't think most of them are too onerous. We tried intentionally to kind of provide pricing that was typical of the industry. The outline is free. The study guide is free to aim members. I want to say it's $60 for non-members. The sample exam is free. But you do have to give us your name and email address. And we generally will send one email out after you take the exam, sometimes six months, within six months after you take the exam saying, hey, do you want to take the real exam? And that's it. We have a CIP preparation workshop which is far from free. But it's on the website. All of this is listed at aim.org slash CIP. They're all there. They're the links. We're not going to trick you out of your credit card. And if we do, send me a note and I'll fix it. And all of our aim training courses align to the CIP now as well. That was one of the things that we did as we relaunched the CIP. And so our ERM course aligns pretty closely to several of the domains actually. Our ECM course aligns to domain one. Our BPM course aligns to domain four and so forth. So if you pass congratulations, you're a certified information professional. You can use the designation instantly. We will send you a pre-certificate that is suitable for printing on your I love me wall. Usually within a couple of days, it may be as much as a couple of weeks if we really get backed up. We only have 24 employees worldwide. But the colleague of mine that does this is usually pretty good about getting them out. At that point, you can immediately start tracking your continuing education credits as I described earlier. On the aim.org slash CIP site, you will, there's also a link. To the continuing education form. I know it's 2017. We should have a web-based form. It's on my list. I think I mentioned we have 24 people. But that form also includes examples. So again, formal academic instruction like this counts. Vendor presentations that are educational count. Going to your local ARMA chapter meeting that's actually a wine tasting doesn't count. Unless they talk about the taxonomy of wines. In which case it would probably count and I'd love to go to that meeting. There's also a recertification fee. This is $25 per year for members or $50 per nonmember. So the fee that you see on the screen is for the entire three-year period. This also represents a substantial discount from retesting. And so again, as with most certifications, we fully expect that most CIPs who choose to maintain it and we hope they all do would do 45 hours and pay this much lower fee as opposed to trying to retest on whatever the current exam is. If you don't pass the exam on the first try, you can take it again. However, you have to pay the exam fee again. And this is fairly common in the certification industry. You will have a score report that tells you, you know, you got a 56.4% aggregate. And domain one, you get a 79%. But domain two, you got a 33%. Well, obviously you focus on domain two more than domain one. You have to wait 15 calendar days to register to take it again. And 90 days in the unlikely event that you have to take it a third or subsequent time. The reason for this is that there are bad people in the world who sit for exams many, many times over the course of a week. And remember five questions at a time and then spit them out to exam cheat and brain dump sites. And we hate those people with a fiery passion of a thousand sons. And so part of the way that we address that is by randomizing the questions. Another way that we do it is by having multiple exam forms. And a third way we do it is by making you wait so that you have to wait a minimum of 15 calendar days. Now, since I know that all of you are honest, reputable, reliable credits to your organizations and communities, I know that you wouldn't do any of that. You instead should look at that 15 days as the opportunity to really sort of study on those areas that you did poorly on. Review the study guide. You can always reach out to me personally if you take the CIP and you're not successful and you kind of wonder why. We do not give you the exam questions that you missed. Again, that's part of the security mechanism. But I can certainly point you to additional resources, many of which are free, many of which are available from other organizations. Again, AIM wrote this, but it's intended to be an industry certification. And so we use ISO 15489. We use the International Institute of Business Analysis, Body of Knowledge. We use the Project Management Institute, Body of Knowledge. We use these sorts of standards. Okay. At this point, I would welcome any questions that anybody has on anything I've covered or anything I haven't. If you could take the mic if you have a question. Go ahead, Anna. Can you talk a little bit more about the options for continuing education? Sure. In essence, we tried to make it as broad as possible. I know that there are certifications that require you to take their stuff and pay them money and do that, and we don't like that. And so if you go to an ARMA chapter meeting or an ALA meeting or trying to think of the other people that are out there doing meetings, PMI meeting, if you go to a vendor demo that you believe to be educational in nature, yes, it's vendor, but it's still, if they're showing you how to do, set up a record center with SharePoint, that's educational in my mind. Writing a paper, writing an article, writing a tweet. No, you don't get credit for writing a tweet. A blog post I'll take on a case-by-case basis. If it's long and meaningful, I may accept those on a case-by-case basis, but generally speaking, what we want is you attended an event, it was educational, it related to a topic on the CIP, we don't care who the sponsor was, be it vendor, be it ARMA, be it the ICRM, be it, you know, San Jose State, it just doesn't matter, as long as it's educational and aligns to the CIP. Every hour of contact, educational content, counts as one credit. So, if you went to the Managing Electronic Records Conference in Chicago next month, I want to say that's 12 and a half hours of credit. If you went to the AIM Conference in Orlando this year, that's 12 and a half hours of credit. I think the ARMA conference every year, it varies between 11 and 14 hours. Did you have a specific example of whether you wondered it would apply? No, I didn't have a specific example. Lisa asked, teaching a course. Yes, Fish. This is an interesting challenge for a lot of us. I teach a lot of AIM courses and I actually had the same discussion with ARMA at length about how do I verify that I actually taught a course. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don't get a lot of those requests. So, but I, but certainly teaching a presentation is, and so, if you're basically doing a presentation three times a week for 14 weeks, yeah, that counts. We just probably have to figure out what the right number of credits is for that, both for development and for delivery. But yes, teaching a course would count too. Delivering a presentation counts extra because you have to develop it and then you have to deliver it. Other questions? And what kind of evidence do you have to provide of you attending an event that would support a continuing education credit? Again, we're pretty flexible. We want proof that you actually did it. So, registration receipt. I don't know if everybody tuned into this webinar and listened to the whole hour. I have no way of knowing that. There's a technical way that we could get to it. Life's too short for that. So, what we would do is we would accept a registration receipt. We would accept a review. We would accept a syllabus or an agenda from the event along with some sort of proof that you attended, an email that says, thank you for registering for this webinar is probably fine. And a lot of it's on the honor system. We reserve the right to audit those and to go back and check. We haven't had any problems yet. So, we try to be as flexible as we think is prudent and reasonable to make sure that people don't find it too onerous to maintain the certification while at the same time recognizing that it is a formal certification and we're not going to hand it out like backer jack prizes. For those of you old enough to get that. Other questions? Hi, JC. It's Lisa again. When you are, have multiple certifications, so like CRM, IGP, et cetera and your review cycles come up at the same time and I noticed you have all three. I just want to talk about managing that because I had two and they both came up at the same time. One was at a three-year cycle and one was at a five and they both happened to kind of come together at the same time. Can you just share your thoughts on, you know, managing, especially if you have three certifications and trying to. Right. Yeah. And by the way, I'm a CIP and I maintain my CIP. I paid the $75 because I'm an AEM professional member even though I work there also. I still pay my dues and I paid the $75 to do my renewal and I had to send in the same form that we expect other candidates to submit. So how I manage it, frankly, I have two answers. One is I keep a spreadsheet. That's the only way I can do it. Otherwise, I'd go nuts. And an awful lot of things where they're done electronically, so that the brochure quote on quote isn't mailed to you. It's an e-brochure like a PDF that you would download. Those URLs go away sometimes. And so generally what I do is when I know I need credits for an event, I download the brochures. I have a spreadsheet. I make sure that I've got either a link to the description of the event or downloaded whatever the description was so that I've got it. We try and provide receipts and we try and work closely with the other organizations in the space, so far the ICRM and ARMA, to get our stuff pre-approved. AIM events for them and likewise. And so the MERC conference is pre-approved for CIP credits. The ARMA conference, once it gets finalized, will be approved for CIP credits. So that's one answer. The other answer, and this is something we don't do, but the two I mentioned just do, is that there's a limit to how long you have to report something. So if you attended the AIM conference, which was in March of this year, and you want to claim it for ARMA credits, or excuse me, for ICRM credits for your CRM, you have six months. If you want to claim it for ARMA IGP credits, you only have two months. And so if you haven't claimed it by May, you're not going to get it. We don't like that approach necessarily, because you still did it in our minds. But they do what they do, and we do what we do. But I think that the key thing is whether it's one certification or a dozen is to have some sort of a tracking mechanism and anything that you do, you participate in that you make sure that you've got some documentary evidence of it, and that you keep that. I think the good news is that most of us, when we do stuff, we register via email or we get a confirmation email, and honestly, who here does inbox zero, right? So we've got all those emails in our Gmail account, or Hotmail, or whatever your personal email account is, and you can go back and refer to those. Is that an interesting question? Yes, thank you. And do you just use a follow-up? I guess I know I do. I use, you know, maybe potentially one item for both certifications. Like, I submit it for potentially both, and that sometimes works too. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key to that is, again, making sure that you meet whatever the time reporting requirements are for the most stringent one. And so when I was doing my IGP, first of all, I submitted stuff way too late, and they just denied it out of hand. And that's really when I started tracking it much more closely. And, okay, I taught this class, here's my thing. I taught that class, here's my thing. And that's when we got into the whole discussion on how do you document being an instructor. But, yeah, I think you have to be organized. And fortunately for us, I think most of us in this discipline tend to be fairly well organized. And absolutely double, triple, dip, if you can. Now, it doesn't always apply, right? Somebody who's a PMP, many of our courses have a little bit of project management in them. But some of them don't. And PMI doesn't recognize any of those. Some of our stuff is approved by the ICRM as records management related. They've actually been pretty good for us in terms of granting, even our BPM course, which arguably is not really records management per se, but part five does cover business process management, and so they give us credits for that. Any other questions? We've got about two minutes left, it looks like. Okay, if there's no other questions, first of all, if there are questions that come up after this or that you didn't want to ask in this forum, feel free to send them to Pat. And she can forward them to me or even send them to me directly and I'll respond and I'll send those responses to Pat as well so that she can disseminate them to everybody. Here's my contact information. I generally try and post my public presentations to slide share. I'm happy to connect if you want on LinkedIn. If you don't want, that's fine too. My Twitter feed is open, so if you want to follow me on Twitter, you absolutely can. I generally try and follow people back who are in this space and in this discipline, unless you start posting about your cats or your kids and then I don't care. I love cats and kids. I love my cats and my kids. I don't care about your cats or kids. And that's my work email, jwilkins at am.org. And I'm usually pretty good at responding pretty quickly. Thank you very much, Jessie. This was really informative. I appreciate your time very much and I see the comments in the chat area are saying the same thing. So I'm going to officially close our presentation.