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CIMA PER Guide — Practical Experience Requirements

Passing the exams gets you to the door — the Practical Experience Requirements (PER) get you through it. Your PER application is what turns exam success into the ACMA and CGMA designations, and unlike the exams, it's assessed on how well you write about work you've already done. Usefully, CIMA publishes its assessors' own criteria for what "not achieved" looks like — so the most common mistakes aren't a mystery. Everything below is drawn from the official AICPA & CIMA guidance.

The requirements, briefly

The three years

CIMA doesn't prescribe job titles — what matters is what you actually do. Management accounting, financial reporting, FP&A, business partnering, audit, treasury, tax, risk, banking, consulting and data analysis roles all qualify. The three years is a full-time-equivalent total, can be built across several roles and employers, and can include experience gained before, during or after your exams — as long as a PER supervisor can verify each role you submit.

The five core activities

You demonstrate three of: evaluating opportunities to add value; implementing strategic decisions; managing performance and costs to aid value creation; measuring performance; and managing internal and external stakeholders. These deliberately mirror the core activities of the Management Case Study exam, so your studies and your PER reinforce each other. Choose the three where your recent experience gives you the strongest, most substantial examples — not the three that sound grandest.

The five skills and behaviours

Unlike the core activities, all five are required: ethics and integrity, leadership, growth mindset, professional scepticism, and communication. Each needs its own STAR write-up with a genuine example — challenging questionable data, mentoring a new joiner, acting on feedback, presenting to non-financial managers, handling a conflict of interest.

The supervisor

A PER supervisor must be someone you currently work for or have worked for, with direct knowledge of your work — normally your line manager, though any more senior person with good oversight of what you do can act. You need one recorded for every role you submit and every achievement you claim, you must get their permission before entering their details, and they sign off electronically once you submit. Depending on your history that might mean one supervisor or several.

The mistakes — straight from CIMA's own assessment criteria

1. Choosing an example that's too small to prove anything

The first item on CIMA's "not achieved" list is an unsuitable situation — a task too small or narrow to demonstrate professional achievement. A routine month-end journal won't carry a 500–750 word STAR write-up. Pick work that was genuinely significant and challenging: a budget cycle you ran, a system implementation you represented finance on, an investment appraisal that shaped a real decision.

2. Writing "we" when the assessor needs "I"

Describing your team's actions rather than your own is an explicit fail criterion. The assessor isn't evaluating your department — they're evaluating you. Every STAR write-up needs your specific role and responsibilities clearly separated from the team's, and the actions described must be things you personally did. If your honest individual contribution to an example feels thin, that's a sign to pick a different example, not to blur the pronouns.

3. Stopping at what you did, without the result

The most commonly under-written part of the STAR template is the R. CIMA's criteria require a genuine discussion of the result of your own actions — the insight you provided, how you influenced the outcome, and what the business benefit was. A write-up that ends at "I prepared the analysis and presented it" hasn't answered the question. What changed because of your work?

4. Writing for your manager instead of a stranger

Your PER supervisor knows your organisation — but your application is also reviewed by CIMA assessors who don't. The official guidance says to write as if addressing a stranger: explain the organisation, its sector and size, and your role in plain terms, and don't lean on internal jargon or system names without explanation. The role and organisation descriptions each get 150–200 words — CIMA recommends using the full allowance and writing in prose rather than bullet points.

5. Mismatching the example to the achievement it's meant to prove

A task that doesn't demonstrate the specific core activity or skill it's assigned to is a fail, however good the write-up. Two traps CIMA calls out by name: for "managing performance and costs", your example must be about organisational performance, not employee or HR performance management; and for "growth mindset", it must be about your personal growth and development, not your organisation's.

6. Leaving the whole thing until you apply

The application is written from memory unless you've kept notes — and three years of good examples fade fast. CIMA recommends reviewing your experience against the requirements every six to twelve months and keeping notes of strong examples as they happen. This also surfaces gaps early: if your role isn't giving you leadership or stakeholder examples, you have time to seek out a project that will, rather than discovering the gap at application time.

7. Submitting experience nobody can verify

Every role and every achievement needs a PER supervisor attached, so experience from an employer where you've lost touch with anyone senior is hard to use — get sign-off relationships sorted before you leave a job, not years afterwards. Two further wrinkles from the official guidance: experience more than ten years old, or recent extended periods out of finance roles, may prompt CIMA to ask how you've stayed professionally current before deciding on your application.

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Based on the official AICPA & CIMA "Practical experience requirements — guidance for applicants" document, including its published assessment criteria, checked July 2026. Requirements can change — always confirm the current rules on your PER dashboard or at aicpa-cima.com before relying on them. GoQualified is not affiliated with CIMA.