It’s not about the piece of paper…

Exams are often placed on the same popularity list as dentists, slugs and food poisoning – but ARMA wants qualifications to be an experience that its members savour. Chief Operating Officer Hamish Macandrew describes how the Association’s pioneering approach to learning is, for him,  finally injecting excitement into examinations!

I still have nightmares about exams – still, after all these years! Will the topic I’ve revised come up? Will I remember all those quotes? Will that weird mnemonic I created resurface, when I need it? Will I be able to spell ‘mnemonic’?

And all those holidays ruined by revision. Days of staring at notes, trying to write essays from memory, while the clock ticked ever louder, heralding the arrival of the first exam.

Somehow, I survived, and I received a few pieces of paper with passable grades. On my graduation day, I remember relishing the thought of never doing another exam in my life. Why would I go through that hell again?

I had aligned exams with something horrific.

My experience of learning had been boiled down like a school cabbage – no colour, no flavour, no fun. Just stuff to contribute to my essential life forces. It wasn’t all ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, but let’s face it, the learning experience was a bit grim.

Fast-forward 35 years to a beautiful summer’s day almost five years ago and my handover with our former COO, Jo.

 I had just started the role and we were talking about ARMA qualifications. Jo was about to begin the major programme to reimagine what are now our Certificate in Research Management qualifications. She spoke about these qualifications with barely-contained excitement. ‘Qualifications’, I thought. ‘Seriously?’

She could see doubt, confusion and a whole wealth of other mixed emotions flashing across my face as my buried past stirred like a zombie in the tomb.

‘It’s not about the piece of paper, Hamish’, she said, chirpily in a slightly authoritative, school-marmy fashion . ‘It’s about the learning’. And she smiled, comfortingly. My zombie started to retreat. The cabbage appeared to be regaining its green…

It quickly became clear that she was right;  ARMA qualifications are all about the learning, structuring what you already know and investigating areas you don’t. They also invite you to demonstrate your knowledge in an assignment format that you’re comfortable with, which you can reuse in your day job.

Furthermore, there is no looming ‘deadline of doom’. You can take a couple of years, or have the whole thing done in six months. You can also submit one or several assignments at the same time – and we have several submission dates per year, so there’s a lot more flexibility.

And, and this is the bit that put my zombie firmly back in its tomb,  if your assignment doesn’t quite hit the mark, we’ll give you lots of helpful, constructive comments on what you need to do to improve your script, and invite you to amend it and resubmit. No failure, just learning and success.

With our new CRM-Foundation and Advanced programmes, you will join a cohort of students. Everyone covers the learning content in the same order, with webinars or workshops offering the chance to get together with your fellow students and our helpful tutors to discuss how you will take on the assignments. We’re all in it together.

There are lots of new resources for our students, too, on our website, including recordings of our webinars. If you get stuck our Delivery Officer, Katherine, is here to help.

And you will get a piece of paper. A rather nice one, endorsed by ATHE.

The next cohort of ARMA’s Certificate in Research Management starts in November. For more information, click here.

This article was first published in Issue 9 of The Protagonist magazine as ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. To download this and other copies of The Protagonist, members can click here.