A Study on Services Motivating Computing Professional Association Membership

Introduction

Computing and information technology professionals (hence forth named computing professionals) work under demanding conditions, and face a constant threat of their skill sets becoming rapidly obsolete because of today’s fast changing technological and business landscapes (Guzman, Stam, & Stanton, 2008). To be equipped with relevant skills necessary to meet current and future needs, computing professional must engage in professional development as a lifelong activity. Professional associations play an important role with facilitating the development of an individual by offering a variety of services to its members. One of the main objectives of professional associations is to ensure professionals’ competencies are up-to-date by providing them access to tutorials, training workshops, and industry certifications (Denning, 2001; Newell, Swan, & Galliers, 2000).

Professional associations help assure that the profession progresses towards maturity by offering a variety of services to its members (Ford & Gibbs, 1996). Computing professional association leadership could benefit from the systematic study to better understand what motivates people to join and maintain membership. Such examination would provide better insights for leadership to provide targeted services to its members. The objectives addressed by this research, thus, are three-fold: (1) develop and validate an instrument to measure factors pertaining to individuals joining and maintaining membership in computing professional associations, (2) examine the relationships between these factors and other relevant demographic criteria, and (3) provide suggestions for computing professional association leadership. The overarching goal of this research is to better understand what expectations and motives an individual has in computing professional association membership in an effort to inform decision-making by the professional association leadership.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, we provide a review of literatures relevant to computing professional associations. We develop a conceptual framework for investigating which services motivate members to maintain professional association membership. Then, we discuss the research methodology used for this study and the results of the survey developed using the conceptual framework. Finally, we provide discussion on the findings and recommendations to computing professional associations.