An edited version of what I posted on a CAM professional body membership page. Would be interesting to know what CAM professionaI practitioners who have eschewed these memberships think. I have a very interesting question to put to CAM professional membership bodies before I persuade my students to join. Now that most practitioners communicate, free, via social media closed or open groups, about best practice, CPD opportunities, courses, standards and teaching and learning generally - what is the benefit of paying to join professional membership bodies? My own recent experience is that they are more concerned about restrictions and closed shop policies that actually hinder rather than progress professionalism within the industry. To give but one example, on most of them, paying members are forbidden from posting information about CPD or other courses on their forums for the benefit of other members. This information has to be routed via education web pages but only if you pay to get the course approved. Whilst this might be acceptable for non members who wish to advertise their courses, it seems harsh to apply it across the board for paying members as well. Something that cant have escaped notice is that the website forums are not used often by those who post or those who respond to posts (if ever!) except when a course is advertised. Furthermore, I suspect most of the website forum activity is course driven! Do their members have a say or their views invited as to where they would like to access information about courses - or is it all about profit and chasing the money. Very short sighted! I left one professional membership body thinking the grass was greener and that the one I joined was less about promoting its board members and their business interests and more about supporting its ordinary members. Perhaps Im being naive - but in these tough recessionary times, I dont think Im the only professional practitioner/tutor questioning value for money (and Im not talking about the plethora of discounts for products I hardly use) or discounted CNHC registration (I am a registrant, by the way). Id like to point out that these are also questions being asked by my very savvy students. They are also rightly perturbed about the rapid rise of one and 2-day practitioner courses for which insurance isnt a problem that seem to be recognised by several professional membership bodies for CAM. So much for the quality assurance argument!
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 11:21:37 +0000
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