The professional standards bring a wealth of benefits to you as an individual but also to your organisation. They set the benchmark for housing professionals and for organisations in the sector.
Benefits for individuals
As an individual, the standards enable you to:
- Make ethical and professional decisions
- Drive change in your organisation
- Progress and succeed in your career through clear progression pathways
- Keep up to date with best practice and changes to the housing landscape
- Network and share ideas with like-minded professionals inside and outside the sector
- Apply your commercial and business acumen
- Learn how to implement innovative ways of working
- Act with increased confidence to perform at your best
- Challenge unprofessional behaviour including bias and discrimination
- Understand and act in line with your personal and professional values.
Benefits for organisations
Investing in the professionalism of your colleagues will:
- Benefit both your reputation and bottom line – professional individuals make good decisions, reduce the risk of things going wrong, provide a better service to your residents
- Offer your board assurance that your staff have the right skills, knowledge, and behaviour
- Support you get ready for any upcoming policy landscape changes. For example, those set out in the Social Housing White Paper
- Ensure your colleagues are always ready to meet new regulatory framework changes relevant to your nation.
Proven benefits
Evidence we collected from CIH students showed that individuals who invest in their professional development are likely to:
- Work more effectively, instead of just working more
- Share the knowledge and information gained with colleagues
- Suggest creative suggestions
- Be an ambassador for the organisation
- Meet customers’ needs and expectations.
Other practical business benefits
From working with a variety of CIH members, housing organisations and professional bodies beyond housing during the development of the standards, investing in professional development can bring you even more benefits.
Benefits like:
- Fewer complaints
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Getting things right first time
- Improved morale
- Confident decision making
- Ownership of professional development
- Increasing value for money, providing a return on investment in the workforce and maximising impact in the workplace
- Improved employee satisfaction
- Improved productivity and capacity
- More creativity and innovation
- Better understanding of strategic vision
- More engaged staff
- More rounded view of the housing sector
- Reduce business risk associated with unclear decision making
- Ability to recruit and retain high-performing employees.
Benefits for residents
For your residents, the standards can be used to:
- Set a benchmark for the attitudes and behaviours residents should expect
- Provide a framework for residents to challenge unacceptable and unprofessional behaviour
- Professionalise actively engaged residents
- Support scrutiny panels assess service delivery and improvements
- Improve resident satisfaction against specified behavioural standards.
Use standards tool
We've created a professional standards tool where you can view all seven standards, their characteristics and find out how to put them into practice.
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Abri case study
Why and how we are using the CIH Professional Standards at Abri. Find out how Abri applied the standards and how it benefitted their staff and organisation.
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Self-assessment
Complete the self-assessment template to help you identify the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to be excellent in your job and even to achieve career goals.
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