The Computer Education Management Association was founded in January 1991, when training development managers from Intel, Interactive, Hewlett Packard, Novell, Santa Cruz Operations, Sun Microsystems, and Wang Laboratories met to discuss the creation of a consortium that focused on the training needs in the computer industry. It was decided that the computer industry could benefit from an organization that would provide leadership and direction in establishing standards for training.

Additional meetings were held to develop the charter and direction of the consortium. The founding members decided that as education managers, our companies were not competing for the same students, and we could share the successes and failures of some of our programs. The group decided to concentrate our efforts on becoming a professional organization for the computer education manager. Hence the Computer Education Management Association (CEdMA) was formed.

Similarly, in 1993, CEdMA Europe was founded by training managers from Oracle, Software AG, IBM, Sun, Sybase, Novell and WordPerfect. We both held to the same core values of non-competitive open sharing of ideas and providing valuable services to our members, as our founders originally envisioned.

In Nov 2018, CEdMA US decided to change from individual-only membership to allow companies to join with as many individuals as they wanted. This immediately doubled the number of individuals but the other “group of 2” membership introduced at the same time reduced the number of companies by one third, with an adverse effect on numbers of inputs for surveys.

In Sep 2023, CEdMA US decided to revert to individuals only AND sever the relationship with CEdMA Europe. This resulted in CEdMA Enterprise with company members only and CEdMA Global with individual members only.