CHMC ACCREDITATION: Elevating Standards in the UK’s Professional Services Sector
Competition is alive and well in the UK’s professional services sector. It drives businesses to continually evolve and adapt and SMEs are always seeking ways to stand out and break through. Professionals are continually looking to improve their skills, develop their talents and prove their worth. Buyers are insisting on ever-greater value for money and efficiency. And, through it all, every company and every economy is chasing one thing: growth.
In these challenging times, the Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) accreditation is proving more valuable than ever. It enables consultants to demonstrate that they adhere to the highest professional standards, providing clients with a kitemark of quality assurance, in a similar way to MCA membership showing that firms uphold the principles of Consulting Excellence.
Created and delivered by the MCA and the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), the ChMC accreditation is a programme of professional development for management consultants. It’s not for the faint hearted. Consultants must demonstrate that they have met the criteria of 53 competencies across a wide range of areas, such as leadership, client relationships, operating environment, and personal and professional development. To become Chartered, they must not only have applied these values in real-life scenarios, but proven that they have gone above and beyond by demonstrating leadership in each of these areas.
The first category of competencies is perhaps the most important, and that is around ethics. To achieve Chartered status, a consultant must prove that they have served clients to the highest standards, establishing relationships based on mutual confidence, trust and respect. They must also be able to show the positive social and environmental impact of their work. These competencies have been described as not just a checklist, but a ‘guiding light’ for the industry. And working towards them is having a huge impact in the real world.
Chartered consultants say that meeting these benchmarks is turning out to be essential to their future work and relationships: 96 per cent believe that the ChMC accreditation helps them demonstrate excellence and credibility to their clients. Even more of them – 97 per cent – say the ChMC accreditation demonstrates integrity and commitment to ethics. Many consultants report that they find Chartered status helps to not only make their firm more be some of the most impactful work, and an impressive 86 per cent of consultants believe that the ChMC accreditation has helped demonstrate the public benefit of their work.
As the government looks to increase the use of SMEs in public procurement, which in turn will help to boost regional growth, ChMC provides a hallmark of excellence for less established companies. Time and again we hear from small consultancies – who form 70 per cent of the MCA membership – about how they must work extra hard to win contracts in an increasingly competitive environment.
ChMC is a simple message from supplier to buyer that says: we are credible; we are at the top of our game; and we are a competitive choice for your next project. One young, dynamic firm described Chartered as not merely a credential, but “a strategic move that has given us a competitive edge”. Is it no surprise, then, that Chartered has continued to grow this year. 50 firms now offer the accreditation, including 14 smaller firms. A record 4,000 consultants are now working towards becoming Chartered, joining the more than 1,600 people who have already done so – consultants from all backgrounds working for firms of all specialities.
Where Chartered is different from many professional accreditations is that it is not just a statement of what consultants have achieved so far, but of where they are going. It is a commitment to continuous development and self-improvement by individuals and of ongoing innovation by the consultancies for whom they work. In that respect, it is one of the ways that consulting – recently identified by the government as one of the UK’s growth-driving sectors – is helping our clients to grow faster.
Whatever they call upon us to do – harness the AI revolution; seize the opportunities of the energy transition; or become more productive, efficient and sustainable – we stand ready to assist;
and ChMC makes us even better placed to do so.
Find out more about the Chartered Management Consultant Award at www.mca.org.uk/chartered-management-consultant-award