Paying for professional memberships required for job

[STEMMum]

Hello fellow academic mums,

We are required to have membership of relevant professional bodies to be able to teach on accrediated programmes. It is quite a lot of money required per year to maintain it and i we have been told to claim it back via tax system but having he money up front is usually an issue. Just wondering if some of you in this same situation will be happy to share what measure their insitution do to help with this cost?

Thank you

We had a run-in over this a couple of years ago. University used to pay these, then they said no. Except that '% membership of professional bodies' remained a KPI for the university! We were a bit at the idea of the senior management team cracking open the champagne for achieving that if we were paying, so we pushed back and we're now allowed to claim back one membership a year. In theory, anyway - just put my expenses claim in today actually so fingers crossed!

Ours aren't paid. £800 once a year, pisses me off every time.

£800!! OMG! Mine was about a 10th of that!

Yup. And if I don't pay I lose the qualification I need to do my job.

I’ve worked in 7 different universities and they all required the academic to pay with no claim back.

Always had to pay for myself. It all adds up. However I did get a small amount of money towards PhD fees.

Wow. I'm an accountant and my £500 pa subs are always paid for by the firm.

I work in admin at rg uni - my understanding is that it's because it's a taxable benefit. There's a hmrc list of professional membership bodies and if the body isn't on there, our academics can't have it paid for. It does create a lot of bad feeling - I hate it!

We have a Uni benefits system that will pay this and then you don't pay tax. The amount kept changing though (and it's £150 not £800) so I gave up and pay it myself and claim back now.

In the case of my profession, I would really prefer it if every member of the department retained membership. We don't provide funding for it however, so some of the staff do allow their membership to expire.

I pay 2 accountant subs - my company use to reimburse one them.
Then 1 day I stood up for myself over a separate issue and my LM decided I no longer need membership to do my job, I just need to be qualified.
CPD opportunities were also scaled back. To nothing.

So now I pay both myself.