President's Message

Jeff Feuquay

Welcome to IPMAAC 1998. I am extremely pleased to report that our organization is in good financial shape, thanks largely to previous presidents, board members and the supportive IPMA staff. My hope this year is to continue that tradition, with the help of a very strong, very experienced management team, and with your extensive involvement.

According to Article II of our bylaws, the purpose of IPMAAC is:

To support the general purposes and methods of the International Personnel Management Association-United States; in particular, to serve as a resource of professional expertise on technical policy matters.
To encourage and give direction to public personnel assessment maintenance and improvement efforts in fields such as, but not limited to, selection, performance evaluation, training evaluation, job analysis, and organizational effectiveness.
To encourage and facilitate intergovernmental cooperation, information exchange, and resource sharing.
To define professional standards for public personnel assessment,
To encourage, give direction, and provide means for the delivery of training and education efforts to upgrade the expertise of public personnel assessment specialists.
To contribute to the formation of public policy relating to public personnel assessment.
To heighten the awareness of public officials and administrators of the needs and advantages of public personnel assessment.

Two recent experiences lead me to believe that we are not fully achieving the goals implicit in our purpose statement. First, at the Boston conference, I was told by an attendee that she did not submit what sounded to me like a very good paper because she assumed that her work was below the standards for our group. Second, I recently joined a new, local human resource association, whose membership includes approximately 40 people from the public sector. That group is in the process of affiliating with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Only a few of its members had heard of IPMA; none had heard of IPMAAC. If those who "should be" members either do not know we exist or do not feel they belong, we can expect only mediocre success in achieving our stated purpose.

My hope for 1998 is that we can better coordinate our mutual efforts to get the word out -- to let potential members know who and what we are, and to let them know in a way that convinces them to join us and participate. I have adopted two simplistic, but certainly objective, metrics of our success:

100 more paid conference attendees in Chicago than we have ever had at a single conference
1 ½ times the number of session proposals that we are able to schedule (i.e., 33% rejection rate).

To accomplish these, we will need to tell the right people who we are and what we do, accurately and seductively. The Board has approved a budget which considerably expands our ability to publicize ourselves. And, the various committee chairs have already been actively working to achieve those goals. As an example, examine the new format for the Call for Proposals - not only does it seek presenters, it communicates who we are and what we do. The underlying goal in our efforts to dramatically increase our exposure is to accomplish what our bylaws say we are all about. Enhanced promotion of our conference, I hope, will have the dual effect of letting more know about us and about the importance of what we do, and will allow us to increase our financial stability and future outreach capability.

Please contact the Committee Chairs, the Board Members or me, if you have ideas in support of our efforts to promote personnel assessment. Thanks and Happy New Year!