Embedding the professional standards: Hanover Scotland’s commitment to professionalism

At Hanover Scotland, we are proud to have taken a deliberate and structured approach to embedding CIH’s professional commitment and standards within our organisation. We believe this commitment is vital for the long-term success of our sector, for enhancing professionalism, and for ensuring we recruit and retain the right people aligned with our values.

To deliver this, we established a short-life project group made up of passionate colleagues from across housing and performance and improvement teams. These individuals brought insight, energy and a shared drive to promote careers in housing and to elevate the professionalism of our workforce.

Aligning activity to our strategy

Using a logic model approach, we linked our activities directly to our People Strategy, ensuring every action taken had a clear outcome and supported our organisational goals. Some of our key initiatives included:

• Developing visual career pathways to provide clarity on progression and professional growth within Hanover.
• Reviewing job descriptions and recruitment practices, including the questions we ask candidates, to better reflect the values and standards of the CIH professional framework.
• Undertaking a full learning needs analysis across all roles, identifying areas of professional development to build a skilled, confident, and future-ready workforce.
• Developing our young persons’ forum, enabling young voices to influence how we attract and support early-career professionals.
• Promoting CPD and professionalism across teams, with a renewed focus on qualifications, training, and career development tools.

Helping boost careers in the sector

All of this is underpinned by an aim to ensure we recruit and retain the right people who live our values and CIH’s professional standards. This will support us to:

• Attract high-calibre individuals to the sector.
• Promote housing as a credible, rewarding and professional career.
• Remain competitive in a tight labour market by showcasing our clear development pathways.
• Increase the number of professionally qualified employees across our teams.
• Clearly defining the professional standards, we expect, and embedding them throughout our recruitment and development activity.

Constantly learning and reporting on progress

We’ve also committed to reporting annually on our progress through the Annual Assurance Statement process and continue to engage with schools, colleges and communities to highlight the rewarding opportunities available in housing through the work of our young persons’ forum.

Through our work, Hanover Scotland is demonstrating how CIH’s professional standards can be lived, not just referenced – helping us build a more resilient organisation, with happy customers and desirable homes and meet our ambition to be a great employer.