Professional Level

APMP Professional-Level Certification (CPP APMP)

Why Pursue Professional?

Professional-level Certification demonstrates to peers, clients, and organisations that:

  1. You have achieved the top-level Certification in your profession, only achieved by a limited number of business development professionals.
  2. You are recognised for making a significant contribution to your organisation and/or the profession.
  3. You are recognised for your ability to lead and direct others in achieving broad-reaching goals.
  4. You are recognised for thought leadership and “out of the box” thinking

The Professional Certification level is appropriate for senior bid and proposal managers and BD professionals with 7 or more years in the profession and have experience in leadership, thought leadership, and senior stakeholder management.

Qualifying for Professional

To earn your APMP Professional certification, qualify by making a significant impact in your own organization or in one of APMP’sbusiness development communities. You must document and present that impact to a panel of assessors, demonstrating superiorleadership, senior stakeholder engagement and management, and communications skills.

To earn Professional Certification you must:

  1. Be a current APMP member.
  2. Achieve APMP Foundation-level and APMP Practitioner-level certification.
  3. Have seven years of experience in a bid and proposal environment.
  4. Provide a reference that will be asked to rate you on nine behavioral and attitude-based competencies in the areas of managing and motivating others to carry out required actions.
  5. Develop a Proposal Professional Impact Paper (PPIP) providing evidence of how you have had a significant impact on your organization and/or the profession.
  6. Participate in a 45-minute panel interview (telephone or face-to-face) to present and answer questions about your PPIP.

The APMP Professional Certification Format

Select a reference who knows you professionally and can rate your leadership skills on pre-defined statements related to the questionnaire.

How to Prepare Your PPIP

Prepare your Proposal Professional Impact Paper (PPIP) using the PPIP Template and following the Standards and Guidelines. As a leader, you are expected to be able to design, develop, prepare and rehearse your presentation without requiring a great deal of mentoring or advice from the APMP Assessors.
Your presentation is limited to 12 slides. You are expected to demonstrate the use of the best practices documented in the APMP BoK for Developing and Delivering Presentations and Graphics and Action Captions within your slide set.

PPIP Presentation and Interview

After your PPIP is assessed, you may be invited to present the impact to a panel of assessors, via conference call or in person. The assessors will evaluate your communication skills against prescribed standards. After your presentation, you will be asked 4 behavioral and leadership questions, which will be provided to you in advance, with the standards for answering. After the interview, the panel will immediately prepare evaluation scores and confirm your results.

How to Select Your Impact

Your impact must represent a significant professional achievement that demonstrates your business development commitment and initiative. The impact must illustrate the sustainable improvement in areas such as customer interaction, proposal and bid management, individual or organisational development, processes, or infrastructure improvement. It must represent a project where you were personally responsible and successfully demonstrated that your organisation, a client’s organisation, or the proposal profession had a quantifiable gain.