Yesterday at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit, the organization launched a companion certification to its long-standing CIPP: the Certified Information Privacy Manager.

“When the IAPP was formed almost 13 years ago,” said IAPP president and CEO Trevor Hughes from the podium in the plenary session at the Summit, “we recognized that we’d have to wrap our heads around the laws, regulations and policy of our field. There was a lot to understand, so most of the early programming was, ‘What do these things say?’ The ‘what’ was critical.”

From that evolved the CIPP, and there are now just under 6,000 individuals who’ve earned the CIPP certification.

However, said Hughes, “what was missing and what has become the evolution of the field are the business management practices that allow us to give life to those laws and standards: The ‘how’ of privacy.”

With that understanding, the IAPP has been working for more than two years on developing a new “operationally focused” certification.

Such is the CIPM. “We ran our beta program with a select group of members this week,” Hughes said, “and we are happy to release it publicly today.”

Aimed at chief privacy officers, corporate privacy managers, compliance officers, risk managers, information security and auditing professionals and a host of others with responsibility for implementing privacy policy, the CIPM covers subject matter like creating a company vision, structuring a privacy team, measuring performance and developing and implementing a privacy program framework.

The IAPP announced in conjunction with the CIPM launch the release of Privacy Program Management, a textbook, with Russell Densmore, deputy chief privacy officer at Lockheed Martin, as executive editor. One thousand free copies of the textbook were distributed to Global Privacy Summit attendees.

“That’s where you’ll find those tools you can use to get your job done,” Hughes said.

The first CIPM trainings will be held starting May 6 and 7 at Convene in New York City and May 28 and 29 at Staples, Inc., in Boston, MA.

Further, Hughes said, later this year the IAPP will announce a recognition of those who hold both the CIPM and the CIPP and have satisfied some other requirements for contributions to the privacy field. “We think these two designations are two sides of the same coin,” he said, “the yin and the yang, the what and the how, and when you put them together, that’s a particularly powerful thing.”

Visit the IAPP website for more information about the CIPM certification.

As part of his address, Hughes also announced the new Westin Fellowship, which you can learn more about here.