Sales Designations Receive Big Boost from Government of Canada’s Sectoral Initiatives Program (SIP)
This week, Canadian Professional Sales Association and the Government of Canada announced a new relationship which will bring considerable funding to developing the sales labour force across Canada over the next three years.
CPSA is partnering with educators, employers, sales professionals and people seeking new employment opportunities to close the sales talent gap and improve Canadian competitiveness. The Government of Canada’s Sectoral Initiatives Program (SIP) is a grants-and-contributions program with the objective of addressing current and future skills shortages by supporting the development and distribution of sector-specific labour market intelligence, national occupational standards, and skills certification and accreditation systems. The program’s mandate is to help industries identify, forecast, and address their human resources and skills issues. The SIP funds partnership-based projects for key sectors of the Canadian economy.
The SIP contribution will enable CPSA, and its industry partners, to accelerate the mission to raise the profile of sales as a professional career and the adoption of professional sales designations. By expanding the network of Accredited Sales Educators and accelerating the creation of a portal through which learners and employers can track skill development, and achievement of designations for career progression, the projects will work toward a balance between supply and demand for sales professionals in Canada.
Richard Louttet, VP Education and Certification at CPSA, said “The Sectoral Initiatives Program is designed to address skill shortages by supporting the development and adoption of labor market research, national occupational standards, and skill certification and accreditation systems. At CPSA, we’ve been working with our industry partners since about 2016 to address the labor market skill shortage in sales through new national standards and learning pathways, and you can see there’s a very natural alignment between the work that the CPSA is doing and the Government of Canada‘s Sectoral Initiatives Program.“
Listen to the CPSA Sales Talent and Recruitment podcast interview with Richard Louttet.
Expanding upon the process of developing the new designations for salespeople in Canada, Martin Boucher explained in another recent CPSA podcast episode, “We created what we call a “competency model”, so we broke it down at the knowledge level and at the performance level … CPSA … gathered feedback, built that model based upon industry feedback. So, today, it’s an open platform that is being augmented through consultation with various organizations and leaders on our multiple boards.”
Later in the interview, Martin went on to explain some of the major benefits of the new sales designations to HR and Professional Development: “The designations are based upon the framework that I talked about, the competency model. And the competency model, it’s an HR professional’s dream because it has totally spelled out what’s required for a top performer for each and every skill, what they need to perform, demonstrate what they to know … essentially, job descriptions can be built using the framework … it helps to bring a sales culture together and some standards and consistency across the board.
It helps with career pathing as well, such as internal promotion. We know that millennials today join our organization and typically have a two to three-year window where they will jump around (from job to job) because they want to see advancement, progression, and growth … (in terms of) the ability to use designations as a milestone for development, what we’ve learned is that we gamify the whole process so there are badges for different skills you can earn on your way to earning the designation. So it allows the individual to see progression, and once you have that, you can build career paths around progression; you’ve got to earn this badge, you have to earn that other badge, etc, to move on.
(In the context of) the performance evaluation … everything is spelled out, and you’re able to standardize the development plan based on that. So, in all and all, it helps with attracting the right candidates but also with retention. We’re working with large national organizations right now and for their … sales recruits, they feel that the badging process embedded in the development journey is crucial. So, we’re very excited about that!”
Listen to the interview with Martin Boucher.
