Ama Serwaa keeps a small folder on her laptop called “Memberships.” It holds nine years of receipts from a professional body she joined soon after her first job in Accra. One evening last month, she opened it, added up the numbers, and stared at the total for a while.
Then she asked herself a question she had never asked before. What did I actually get for this?
She could think of the certificate. She could think of the letters after her name. Beyond that, nothing came to mind. No meeting she had attended, no person she had met, no course she had taken, no opening it had led to. Nine years of fees had bought her a line on her CV that no employer had ever asked about.
She is not unusual. Many Ghanaian professionals keep paying a subscription long after it has stopped doing anything for them, mostly because cancelling feels like admitting a mistake. So here are nine signs that a membership may have stopped earning its place. One sign alone doesn’t settle it. Several together usually do.
1. Nobody can tell you what it takes to join
Ask a simple question: what does someone have to do to become a member? In a serious body, the answer is clear and a bit demanding. There is an examination, or a check on qualifications and work experience, or both.
If the honest answer is “fill in a form and pay,” think about what that means for the letters you carry. A designation that anyone can get by paying says very little about the person holding it, including you.
2. Employers have never heard of it
Kofi, a quantity surveyor in Takoradi, found this out in an interview. He mentioned his membership proudly, and the panel asked, politely, what the body was. He had no good answer.
You can test this before it happens to you. Look at five job advertisements for the role you want. See which memberships they ask for. Then ask two or three people who do the hiring in your field whether they would recognise yours. Their faces will tell you most of what you need to know.
3. You can’t find out who runs it
A healthy body is easy to look into. You can find the names of its leaders, how they are chosen, and when members get to vote. If every question about governance gets a vague reply, or none, take that seriously.
Some bodies hold an annual general meeting and share their accounts with members. Others never do. When members have no way to see how their money is used or to hold leaders to account, the organisation tends to drift toward serving whoever controls it.
4. The only message you ever get is an invoice
Check your inbox. When did the body last write to you about something other than payment? An invitation, a short report, a call for volunteers, a note about a new regulation in your field?
A membership that speaks to you only once a year, and only about money, is behaving like a subscription service with no content. You are paying, and nothing is coming back.
5. There is no real code of conduct
Ask to see the code of ethics and find out what happens when a member breaks it. Good bodies publish the code, explain the process, and sometimes sanction people in public. That is uncomfortable for them, and it is also the point.
If there is no code, or there is one that nobody has ever enforced, the body is protecting its fee income more than its name. Over time, the value of your own designation follows.
6. The learning is thin
Continuing professional development should be the part of membership that pays you back. Ask what you actually get. Workshops that teach something, conferences with speakers you would travel for, study materials you could not easily find elsewhere.
Be wary when “development” turns out to mean an attendance certificate for a single talk, or when everything useful sits behind an extra fee on top of your subscription. In Kumasi last year, a young accountant told her colleagues she had paid more for the body’s events than for her membership itself. That ratio should make you stop and think.
7. The fees climb and you can’t see why
Fees do go up. Costs rise, and good bodies have to pay for staff, venues and systems. The warning sign is a rise with no explanation and nothing visible in return.
Ask where the money goes. A body that welcomes the question will answer it, probably with a budget or an annual report. A body that gets defensive, or says it is “not for members to worry about,” has told you something.
8. You feel pressure to pay now
Watch for countdown offers, “special” rates that expire in 48 hours, designations promised within days, or a sales tone from an organisation that is supposed to be a professional institution.
Real bodies do not need to chase you. Their standards, their reputation and their track record do most of the work. When the pitch sounds like a market-stall shout, treat the thing being sold with the same care you would give any unfamiliar deal.
9. There’s no sign of life
Visit the website. Look at the last news item, the last event, the last photograph. Check whether any chapter or branch is active in the city where you live, whether Tamale, Ho, Sunyani, Cape Coast or somewhere else.
Send a polite question to the contact address and see how long a reply takes. A body that never answers a prospective or paying member is telling you how it will treat you later.
Before you walk away
Don’t resign in anger tonight. A few things are worth trying first.
Spend an honest month engaging with it. Attend one event. Email the secretariat with a specific question. Ask a senior member in your field what they get out of it. Sometimes the problem is that you have never used what is there, and a poor body and a neglected one can look identical from the outside.
If you do that and still find nothing, you have your answer, and you will leave with a clear reason rather than a vague sense of waste.
Then do what Ama did next. She wrote down the roles she wants over the next five years, found out which memberships those employers value, and moved her subscription to a body that fits. It cost her one evening of research. It saved her, as she puts it, from a tenth year of paying for letters nobody reads.
Ama, Kofi and the others in this article are illustrative characters, and their names are fictional.
Chapter 4 of Maximising Your Professional Membership covers how to choose a professional body, including a checklist to use before you join. You can also download free personal development worksheets and see the author’s other books at www.asarebediakoadams.com.