Celebrating 27 Years: Launching the New COMETSA Members Portal and Enhancing Engagement Through Specialized Forums!

This is the most exciting time in our organisation’s history as we roll out the implementation of our new members portal. This is part of the countdown to the 27th Anniversary of the COMETSA Group on August 1, 2024. It has been a beautiful journey since the establishment of our organisation as a development football club in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, on the 1^st of August 1997.

The establishment of the COMETSA Membership Club, www.CometsaMember.Com, and the COMETSA Friends & Supporters Club NPO are among the highlights of our organisation’s twenty-seven-year history. 

The new portal allows us to support our members’ personal and professional development through  

– blogs,

– interests,

– member profiling,

– a members’ photo library,

– a member document library,

– a business directory, and

– members forums.

With the introduction of new membership types, we have also established specific forums to cater to the unique needs and interests of each type. This ensures that our interaction and engagement with the members are more targeted and effective.

The following forums are active for members of the appropriate member type to engage in dialogues, conversations, debates, and development interventions virtually, face-to-face or through hybrid means.

1. Business Advisors Forum: This forum has multifaceted business advisors as members. Business Advisors are practitioners who work on demand for urgent solutions to business problems and challenges. They mostly have experience in a particular field from many years of working there or have specialised in a specific field. Like lawyers, they are available per booking.
2. Business Consultants Forum: Suppose you are an aspiring or practising business consultant. In that case, you should interact with fellow practitioners. Before defining yourself in your sector, you should identify with fellow business consultants. We have established the Business Consultants Members Forum to provide such a home for business consultants. Business consultants are independent individuals and organisations that practice consulting in multiple sectors.
3. Professional & Executive Coaches Forum: This is home to members who have chosen coaching as their area of professional practice. Their profession requires them to embark on continuous professional development. The best approach is to engage with both academic and practitioner coaches at this specialisation forum for coaches. To belong to this membership type, you must be a qualified, credentialed, accredited, practising coach and member of a reputable coaching federation.
4. Corporate & Organisational Members Forum: This is well placed to serve the interests of all our organisation’s membership types. We want our corporate members’ representatives and subject matter experts to engage with members from diverse membership types. We don’t wish our corporate members to talk to themselves but serve our broader membership’s knowledge, interests, and development needs. Corporate and organisational membership offers our members a talent pool.
5. Entrepreneurship Development Forum: Entrepreneurs and self-employed practitioners are the most isolated individuals. It is lonely out there running your own business. But if you know that you belong to a group of fellow entrepreneurs you visit regularly, it is easy to overcome the challenges of entrepreneurship. For this reason, we established this forum and the membership type. They are reserved for aspiring, emerging, and seasoned self-employed business practitioners embracing entrepreneurship.
6. Facilitators Development Forum: The forum serves the most diverse sectors. Facilitation is a generalist profession to a certain extent, as facilitators engage across sectors. This forum is reserved for professional and executive facilitators and self-developed practitioners with years of experience facilitating strategy development, team-building workshops, seminars, conferences, digital online streaming shows, and general events.
7. Human Resources Consultants Forum: No business is without talent and people. Human resources and people management have a direct impact on business success. Human resources practitioners are the most engaged professionals in the industry. We wanted to provide a platform for our members working and practising in human resources and people-related functions to engage each other in their personal and professional development. Hence, the HR Consultants Forum.
8. Members’ eCommerce Portal Forum: To fully enjoy the benefits of our member eCommerce Platform Forum, we conduct monthly sessions to orientate, induct, train, and guide our members on how to complete the individual membership profiles and business directory, join the forums, contribute to the blogs, network with other members within the platform, identify their local chapters, create their photo albums, register for events, etc. This monthly forum is not compulsory but highly recommended, especially for new members.
9. Mentors Development Forum: offers a platform for practitioners, professionals, specialists, administrators, managers and leaders to sharpen their skills, competencies, and knowledge continuously. It is dedicated to the specialist membership type for experienced and professionally qualified mentors who can demonstrate impressive competencies in supporting learners, employees, managers, and leaders in diverse sectors.
10. Motivational Speakers Development Forum: This forum is for highly disciplined professionals who specialise in supporting clients by painting a positive picture of the future, affirming and enlightening them to believe in their capabilities. The motivation they receive helps them face the challenges in their personal and professional development journey. By coming together and learning from each other, they grow the profession. Motivational speakers are gifted and have the art of inspiring others.
11. Ordinary Members Development Forum: This forum is established to serve the interests of our organisation’s entry-level members. Through this forum, we aim to equip our members in this category with foundational knowledge, insights, skills, and competencies. Public members are welcome to apply for individual membership in this category. We are mindful that this membership level is reserved for employed or self-employed adults who no longer qualify for the Tertiary Student Membership level.
12. Professional Members Development Forum: this platform is for conversations informed by this membership type’s personal and professional development needs and interests.  It is reserved for those who have outgrown the Individual Ordinary Membership type but are not interested in Specialisation membership types. Its distinguishing feature is its functioning at the professional, management, and leadership levels. They may stay in this type permanently and address wide-ranging issues.
13. Tertiary Students Development Forum: This forum is for young and active full-time students at colleges, academies, universities, and business schools. These students enjoy networking and being exposed to our higher-level members, which is critical for their transition into the world of work upon graduating from their studies. They are encouraged to bring pertinent topics to the forum and engage fully with the subject matter experts. It is a forum for tertiary students by tertiary students.

NB: Keep your membership status current and subscribe to the forum relevant to your membership type. Most of our members are classified as Ordinary Members. They can leave their membership at this basic level or upgrade to the Professional Membership level, which is for diverse industry operatives and practitioners, or they can upgrade to specialist membership types.

Note: We have designated the period from July 1st, 2024, to June 30th, 2025, as the time for our members to reorganise their membership according to their membership types and familiarise themselves with the Chapters they are assigned to according to the municipalities and regions to which they belong.

For those who have not yet joined the COMETSA Membership Club, they are invited to apply for their membership online at www.CometsaMember.Com

We are looking forward to welcoming you onboard.