2. Handling your CMI registration

If you dread tackling the admin involved in registering with CMI, you’ll be glad to hear that your course provider will handle everything related to your CMI registration and certification for you.

It’s worth noting that the CMI fees (for registering with them) will often be included as part of your course fees – although, you should definitely check this with your CMI provider when enrolling on your course.

3. Tutoring or providing access to learning resources

It shouldn’t surprise you to read that the overarching purpose of CMI providers is to help you pass your CMI qualifications, and they do this by offering tutoring and resources. These can come in different forms, including:

ManagementDirect – This is the CMI online library of resources with over 400 videos, 9,000 ebooks and 10,000 journal articles – a fountain of management and leadership knowledge to help you with your CMI course assignments! 

When searching for providers, however, bear in mind that every approved CMI provider will give you access to ManagementDirect (as a minimum).

Guided learning – If you’re after lessons, a small number of CMI providers will teach you the required content for your CMI qualification in live classes; however, these are few and far between and they tend to be expensive. Great, though, if you like classes and if you can afford them.

The majority of CMI providers simply guide you to ManagementDirect and do nothing more, and this requires you to do a lot of your own research. It’s a lot of work because a lot of the syllabus is not well covered by Management Direct and you’re often alone to find the relevant material, and even then, you might get the wrong end of the stick! It’s crucial that you check your provider does not fall into this category.

Other CMI providers (Astranti included) will allow you to learn the content in your own time using a set of guided learning materials. Those materials will direct you to the most appropriate articles, ebooks and instructional videos online (whether on ManagementDirect or elsewhere) to help you learn and for you to reference in your assignments. Or else, you may be given materials the provider has made themselves. 

Tutor support – This is when your CMI provider offers you access (usually through emails, forums or phone calls) to an expert tutor, who can help you if you encounter difficulties with your learning or assessment. However, levels of support will differ between CMI providers. Some will be very hands-on and help to guide you through your course using a course mentor (yes we do that too!), and others might just offer some general advice at the start along with some feedback for your assignments.

Most providers will review your assignments prior to submission to ensure they are on track. They can’t write them for you, but they can guide and support you to ensure you are going in the right direction. Again, check your provider does this!

CMI call their approved course providers ‘centres’, and this includes providers that teach in-person as well as those that are partially or entirely online. 

You can find over 850 centres in CMI’s directory. You’ll notice that most of them are UK CMI courses, but that’s because CMI is a UK institution.  

Although that’s a lot of providers to whittle down, the page does come with a few filters that allow you to organise the results by:

Qualification – You can easily rule out centres that don’t offer your chosen CMI qualification.

Delivery method – These may be face-to-face courses but there is also the option to do CMI distance learning or blended courses, which we discussed above.

Location – Physical addresses where the provider is based and where classroom courses would take place. This won’t be particularly relevant if you’re doing a CMI distance learning course.

After using these filters, you might still be left with a long list of potential CMI course providers to choose from. Now comes the time-consuming part of the process: looking at each of these CMI providers and narrowing them down based on what you need and want. 

How you narrow down your choices will depend entirely on you, but there are lots of factors to consider. Do you want a UK CMI course or one based in another country? Do you want loads of in-depth teaching and materials, or do you just need enough of an introduction to apply it to your organisation? Would teaching help or would you prefer CMI online course materials that you could use at your leisure? Do you need lots of tutor support? Is the material written in a way that will help you most effectively? How much do you want to spend? 

Since it’s a pretty important consideration, we’ll look at that last question in a bit more detail below. 

You’ll find a wide range of CMI course prices when researching different providers.

If you’re looking at CMI distance learning options, for each UK CMI course, you can expect to pay roughly:

• Award – £500
• Certificate – £500-£1,000
• Diploma – £1,500-£2,500

Those are the prices for CMI distance learning courses, but you’ll find that UK CMI courses that include classroom tuition can cost significantly more, in some cases between £2,500 and £4,000.

If you’re unaware of the difference between the three qualification types, check out our definitive guide to CMI.

Key price considerations

What you’re willing to pay is a vital consideration, but make sure to think about the following as well:

Before parting with your hard-earned cash, you need to be confident that you’ve chosen the course that best suits your needs. But how do you go about spotting the best CMI course providers? Well, more on that next!

We wouldn’t recommend tossing a coin or pulling a name out of a hat to choose a CMI provider, even if you might be daunted by the prospect of choosing from amongst CMI’s list with hundreds of reputable centres!

Instead, here are 4 key factors that we would recommend you consider when deciding on a provider:

Trialling 

You wouldn’t buy a house without seeing it first or purchase a car without giving it a test drive.

You’ll be committing to studying your CMI course for several months and spending hundreds of pounds – therefore, it’s crucial that you see a sample of what you’ll get for your money. 

Be aware that many CMI providers don’t advertise free samples, but they may oblige if you ask (nicely), so you may have to send a few emails to enquire!

Guarantees

We’ve already seen how studying CMI is a significant financial investment. So, you’ll want to look out for CMI providers that offer guarantees. Two types of guarantees that you may encounter are:

Flexibility

As a manager, your time is probably at a premium (not to mention whatever else you have going on in your life). Therefore, part of narrowing down the available CMI providers that we mentioned above should include considerations of how flexible you need the CMI course to be. 

Do you only have a couple of hours a week to fit around childcare responsibilities? Maybe CMI online materials would be more convenient. Do you live in the countryside, away from any cities? CMI distance learning is probably a better option. 

There’s a tremendous range of different courses out there, so you should be able to find a provider that can accommodate and support your needs – whether that’s through in-person classes or CMI distance learning providers.

We hope you’ll decide it is Astranti, but do recommend you look around to make sure you find the provider that is just right for you. By considering the areas we’ve discussed above, you’ll be in a much better position to judge which CMI provider will best fulfil your needs and help get you qualified!