Stratton to lead national personnel group

Classified Personnel Office Director Jim Stratton has been elected president of the International Personnel Management Association, a nonprofit membership organization for agencies and individuals in the human resources field.

Stratton will serve for three years, first as president-elect, then as president and finally as past president as part of a three-member executive committee of the executive council. He was president of the Wisconsin chapter and Central region before serving on the executive council for six years.

“I’m excited about it; it’s quite an honor,” says Stratton, who has been a member of the association for more than 20 years. “It’s just a really great experience from people I’ve talked to who have done it.”

As president of the 5,500-member IPMA, Stratton will preside over the association’s regional conferences, two executive council meetings and two international meetings in Ottawa, Canada, and Barcelona, Spain. As part of the executive committee of the executive council, Stratton is responsible for determining the association’s agenda and policies.

Stratton has several goals he would like the association to reach this year.

“I established three goals,” Stratton says, “first, to continue to build on the use of technology in what we do. I’d like to have at least one of our sessions on the Web.”

Conducting more meetings in cyberspace would reduce costs and ensure greater participation, Stratton says.

Stratton would like to put more focus on building IPMA chapters, “the grass roots of the organization, the things that make us go.”

Finally, as part of chapter building, Stratton would like to develop more international chapters. IPMA has been working with South African countries to build exchanges as part of a development initiative. The organization recently established a chapter in Pakistan.

Stratton says he thinks the current world environment will bring extra challenges to the organization.

“There is a lot of uncertainty,” he says. “We’ll try to make the organization move forward as far as international chapters.”

Stratton has served as director of Classified Personnel Office at UW–Madison since 1981. He manages the classified civil service program, including employee classification, compensation, recruitment and human resources development issues with the Office of Human Resource Development.