PER Webinar questions

How long do I have to complete my PER after I have completed the SCS?

The submission deadline for any candidate is 30 September of the fourth year after the year
they sat and passed their final exam.

If you miss this deadline, there is normally a penalty fee of £190 that is charged to your account
plus the new fee for the membership application fee which usually goes up every year.

Your experience will never expire. You just need to make sure you have a supervisor who can
verify it.

Therefore, we would recommend you complete your PER as soon as you can.

Word count for your experience

For the employment history, the guidance is 250 to 300 words per role or 800 characters. As
characters can include spaces between letters, we would recommend sticking with the 250–
300-word count.

The 250-300 word count minimum requirement is for each employment module recorded and
not across the employment history sections recorded.

For the Core activities/skills and behaviours 500-750 words. If you go over this limit, you won’t
be penalised, but we would recommend not writing too much as this can sometimes dilute the
experience you are trying to explain.

The 500–750-word count is across the star technique. You could for example be very brief with
the situation and task but provide more detail for the action and results sections.

We would recommend against the use of bullet points as it doesn’t give the assessor enough
evidence to give you an informed decision based on your experience.

When can you start recording your PER?

As soon as you start the Strategic level, the PER dashboard will be displayed. At this point you
will be able to start recording your experience.

You can get your PER submitted and approved before you pass your SCS exam and this way as
soon as you have completed the exam, you can upgrade immediately.

If you haven’t got the 3 years of experience, rather than to wait, we would recommend you get
whichever sections you can get verified. Sections can be submitted section by section.

Regardless of whether you had a career break or completed PER a long time ago, you can still
complete it via your PER dashboard.

If you submitted PER under an older syllabus and it was deferred, you will need to submit it
again via the online PER dashboard.
Membership Certificate
Certificates will be dispatched 4-6 weeks after you have upgraded your membership. Once you
have completed your SCS exam and have had your PER approved you will be invited to upgrade
for membership.

We have been experiencing a delay recently due to the change with our printing supplier, but
process should be back to normal by the end of June.

Right now, we only offer Hard copy certificates and not virtual/online ones. Certificates can also
be collected from the local office.

Supervisor for sign off.

Your current manager can sign off all your experience. If you for some reason don’t have a
supervisor to sign off your experience, in extreme cases where there is no one else that can
verify it, please reach out to the team.

If your manager has left the company, try and find a way to locate them via LinkedIn or any other
routes available to you. Alternatively, there may be someone else at the company you worked
at that could sign off your experience.

If your supervisor was at your employer for 2 years and you have 3 years of experience, they
would only be able to sign off 2 years of your experience and you would have to find another
person to sign off your remaining year of experience.

The PER link will be sent directly to your verifiers email address and can sometimes get stuck in
spam. Regarding the LinkedIn information, a weblink to your managers LinkedIn page should
be sufficient but this is an optional field.

Your supervisor needs to be someone who is in a more senior position to you and can confirm
your experience. They don’t need to be a qualified accountant and even if they have left the
company, they can still sign off your experience.

Regarding multiple roles/promotions, it is up to you how you record your experience. We ask
that if you have more than one supervisor for the same employment, you do two separate write
ups to so that each manager can verify sections of this experience.

Always enter the details of the company you had worked for previously if you are using earlier
experience. My only thing about using previous experience is being able to locate your previous
managers to approve your experience at that point in time. Ideally I would like to think they
have a LinkedIn address for you to reach out to them on.

If there are any issues with the supervisor not receiving the email link to review your PER, please
reach out to us.

Regarding the experience you record, if you are outside of a traditional finance role but have
finance elements in your current role, emphasise this in your write up and really focus on the
finance aspects of your role and how this adds value.

If you are the owner of your business, a client/auditor will be able to sign off on your experience.
If you only have a personal email for your supervisor, we can consider this depending this on a
case-by-case basis.
Supervisors/managers don’t need to create a login in. The PER link will take them straight to the
Supervisor dashboard where they can begin to review your experience and the process
regarding time it takes to review your application/experience all depends on how much you
have recorded. Just to note, there is a feedback section for your manager to leave feedback.
This is optional.

Type of experience
As mentioned on the webinar, any experience gained whether before starting your CIMA studies
or during/after your CIMA studies can be used, providing that you feel that it is relevant, and you
can get it signed off.

My only advice is that if you have teaching experience, please reach out to us as we may give
you a different form to complete as there are routes to membership for academics/lecturers.

The experience/examples used in the Star technique should relate to the employment
experience you log as this will enable the membership assessors who review your experience to
see the whole picture.

You can use one example for more than one of the Core activities/skills and behaviours but just
make sure you write it from a different perspective and not copy and paste. We would
recommend one example per activity and would suggest you use the best experience gained as
the example.

You do not have to share confidential information. We just require information that will help the
assessors to understand your experience.

The 3 years of experience don’t need to be consecutive. We just ask that you write up each of
your employment rolls separately (E.g. if you have promotion, have different supervisors or have
been in multiple roles)

Process after submission

Once your application has been approved by your manager and all modules have been signed
off, you will see a banner that reads “Your application is in audit” At this stage your application
goes into a queue where the membership team will perform a quick audit to make sure your
application is in the correct format (e.g. no bullet points, level of detail appears sufficient etc)

Once your application has passed the initial audit by my team, we will then allocate it to a
membership assessor to begin the assessment process. At this stage, the audit banner will
disappear from your profile.

The process from the point of the audit banner displaying on your profile to your application
being approved will take 2-4 weeks. If my team feel that your application needs additional
information during the initial audit check, we will communicate to you the additional
information needed and as a result to receive a decision on your application could take 4-6
weeks due to the initial delay.

If you the membership assessors do not approve application, you will see an action required
status and feedback will be displayed as to the additional information required. You will then
provide this additional information and your manager will have to sign of the required sections
of your application.
Application fee for PER is currently £190. This is paid during the upgrade to membership
process once you have passed your SCS exam and had your PER approved and only needs to be
paid once.
Your application needs to meet the 3-year minimum requirement in order for it to be
considered.

End Date of current employment

If you are currently in employment/ongoing employment, the end date to use would be the date
you submit your experience/module. Never submit future experience as your application will
automatically be rejected.

Fees
Your membership application fee is paid during the membership upgrade process. Once you
have completed your SCS exam and have had your PER approved, you will be invited to upgrade
your membership.

Currently the application fee is £190. If your account is in suspended status because you have
not paid your subscription fee for last year, this needs to be paid first before the system will
allow you to upgrade your membership.

Minimum experience required.

A minimum of 3 years’ experience is required. If you record part time experience, the system
will calculate the full time equivalent.

The Core activities/skills and behaviours we ask you to demonstrate is across your employment
experience. Therefore, if you listed 3 different employers for your employment history, we
wouldn’t expect you to record Core activities/skills and behaviours for all employment history
recorded.

Errors on your PER dashboard

If there are modules in draft on your profile that need removing or anything else that is
preventing you from submitting your PER, reach out to the team and we can resolve the issue.

FLP
If you have completed the FLP program, you are still required to complete PER.

Sign off process.

Each module will go to your supervisor individually when they have been submitted for sign off.
If you submit 8 modules to the same supervisor, once they log in, they will be able to see all 8
modules submitted.

Experience can be submitted at any point once you have reached the strategic level of the
qualification, and you can submit sections at a time which should hopefully make the process
easier for you.

Feedback is optional for your supervisors. If additional information is needed from a CIMA
membership assessor, we would advise a maximum wait time of two weeks to receive a
decision but if volumes of applications are lower during that period it could be a few days to
receive an update. Of course where there is urgency, the team will work to get a resolution
asap.
Other questions
• If you are on the CFO pathway, you wouldn’t complete online PER as you would have a
different form to complete your membership.
• The only thing your supervisor can see is your PER application when they click on the
link to review your PER, They won’t be able to see exam grades etc.
• If your PER was previously deferred, you don’t need to mention this when you re-submit
your application.
• Only the sections that require additional information will be rejected. Some parts of
your application could be approved and others not.