With baby boomers retiring, millennials changing jobs, and low unemployment levels, credit unions are facing challenges when it comes to acquiring, developing, and retaining talent.

Based on the changing landscape of the workforce as well as member feedback, CUES—an association dedicated to developing credit union talent—recently announced a new, simplified membership structure and a host of new benefits.

“Through market research, through member feedback, we learned that we had a great opportunity to improve the value of what we delivered to our membership …,” said CUES President and CEO John Pembroke. “This was our opportunity to really deliver more opportunity, help them fight the war for talent. Also, there were some internal needs as well, in that we wanted to simplify our membership structure.”

In response to that latter point, CUES announced a new three-tier membership structure. “Now for one flat fee, our credit unions can sign up as many members as they want for membership on the management and the board side,” he said. “No longer is there a management membership and a board membership—there’s just one membership, and they can sign up all the members that they want.”

Along with those membership tiers, CUES also announced an array of new and enhanced benefits to better serve its members, including curated content, personalized learning pathways, and peer-to-peer networking.

While the new CUES membership structure won’t officially launch until mid-August, Pembroke said that initial feedback has been very positive. “We are an organization that takes our member feedback very seriously, and we built this offering based on our member feedback and we built it with our members,” he said.

Ultimately, CUES wants to better serve its members and its mission. “We are the leaders in talent development in our industry—and we want to continue to be that,” Pembroke said. “In order to do that, we have to be a resource for credit union leadership on the management and the board side to continue to educate and develop their staff, so leaders can continue to have organizations that thrive and are successful.”

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