Mark Law, Lead Tutor
Expert consulting practitioner with extensive experience in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Certified Management Consultant & Registered Mentor for the CMC. Career Mentor to London Business School MBA students and Alumni.
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Professional Certifications
Mark Law
One of the things I enjoy most about my job is helping people take the next steps in their careers. Examples of this include helping people:
- Switch careers into consulting (from all sorts of professional backgrounds)
- Land jobs with the big consulting firms (includes LBS & Judge MBA students)
- Secure their next roles following redundancy (I am particularly proud of this)
- Set up as independent consultants (this is enormous fun!)
- Grow their consulting practices
A common theme in all my work is the discovery that consulting skills give people a major advantage in today’s competitive workplace. This is true even for those with advanced degrees and other professional qualifications (~30% of my students have MBAs). Why is that?
I was recently interviewed by the editor of Professional Manager (the Chartered Management Institute magazine, circulation ~90,000). Click here to download the article.
What I argue in this article is that managers spend a great deal of their time tackling investigative problems and that consulting skills help them become much more effective at this. Why risk ‘winging it’ when there are extremely powerful consulting methods that can help you and your colleagues tackle complex problems and challenges much more effectively at lower risk?
Click here for more information about our work.
As a professional engineer I have long been fascinated by ergonomics, the art and science of optimising the human / machine interface. This superb book is all about how to optimise web site ergonomics and get the best possible results in terms of building your brand and attracting business. Continue reading
Do you ever get the feeling that web surfing is a bit like driving a car on vacation? We pass through all sorts of interesting places yet if we need to capture their essence we need to go to the hassle of pulling over, climbing out, preparing the camera and then take the photograph. On the web we have to go to the effort of bookmarking a page (useless when the web site changes) or perhaps copying and pasting the web page into an MS Word file and figuring out where to save it on our hard drive. What a hassle! Continue reading
Venue: Lincoln’s Inn. Format: 1 hour interactive presentation + Q&A
Speakers: Nader Tavassoli, Professor of Marketing at LBS & Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide Continue reading
London Business School’s Professor Lynda Gratton has said employers will look for specialist skills in the coming years. Professor Gratton said that employers will be looking for “deep” skills over more general ones over the next decade. She suggested that people looking for work in 2020 will be required to have a far different set of skills than today. Continue reading
Management of Value or MoV is a major UK central government initiative designed to ensure the effective deployment of value management / value engineering (VM/VE) throughout the public sector. MoV is led by the Major Projects Directorate of the Cabinet Office. Continue reading
Several enterprising people recently booked onto our courses having secured 100% funding for course fees, qualifications and travel expenses.
Please email laura@amskills.com for further information about these little known training grants which are available to independent consultants and those facing redundancy in the UK.
Venue: London Business School. Format: 45 minute interactive presentation + Q&A
Speaker: Ellen Miller, Faculty of Organisational Behaviour
Whoever you are and whatever your aspirations, the chances are that your success is closely linked to your professional networking skills.
I recently attended a number of events on the subject. This one was particularly interesting due to the following check list which I have adapted to make it more useful: Continue reading
As a product category there is no doubt that children are woefully faulty. They don’t come with an instruction manual, a money back warranty or even an on/off switch. Kids have more faults than a Toyota and governments everywhere should legislate immediately to protect the innocent and unwary!
Being a parent is a wonderful experience and we love our children to bits and yet, if we are truthful, we frequently find ourselves tearing our hair out with the difficulty of it all. Speaking personally, the younger generation are a major source of stress, up there with long hours, demanding clients and even the challenge of finding new business. Continue reading
Pink but Perfect!
Many of us watch in amazement as our pension pots stagger from one financial crisis to the next barely keeping pace with inflation. We entrust our life savings to professional fund managers to little effect. Could we do better ourselves? John Kay thinks we can and this book is a great introduction to this.
John is a well regarded economics professor (ex-LBS where I attended his excellent lectures) and his position is based on sound economic principles. His starting point is that although there are a few very good investors (e.g. Warren Buffet and George Soros), most of us (including eminent economics and finance professors) are pretty rubbish. The randomness of the market may make us feel we are skilled in the short term but over the longer term we get fairly average returns. Continue reading
VM/VE is one of the best management consulting methodologies ever developed. Originally formulated in the late 1940s by Lawrence Miles at General Electric and refined by many practitioners over the years, VM/VE is a powerful problem solving system designed to maximize the value of products, services, projects and processes.
VM/VE is an evidence based methodology featuring team working, sense making, optioneering, stakeholder management and benefits realization. Skilled value practitioners are able to apply the framework to solve most organizational problems.
Our courses are registered VM/VE modules:
- The Professional Consultant is a registered Foundation Course in VM/VE
- The Lean Operations Consultant is a registered Advanced 1 Course in VM/VE
- The Strategy Consultant is a registered Advanced 2 Course in VM/VE
- Booking Enquiry Form
The European Standard BS EN 12973:2000 Value Management was developed to keep EU economies competitive in global markets and the European Training and Certification scheme was developed within which our courses are fully approved. Certified value practitioners (PVMs) are registered to practice throughout Europe.
Unlike many consulting methodologies, VM/VE is designed to be future-proof and it constantly evolves to incorporate new thinking and innovation. You can find practitioners working in most areas of commerce, public sector and even in leading not-for-profit organisations. Contact us for more information.
Chartered Management Institute
We are a fully Approved Training Centre of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). The CMI is the UK’s leading chartered professional body for professional managers, founded in 1947, and currently has over 90,000 members. The CMI offers a wide range of qualifications which ultimately lead to the Chartered Manager professional qualification. Visit www.managers.org.uk/ for more details.
Institute of Consulting
We are a fully Approved Training Centre of the Institute of Consulting (IoC). The CMI merged with the Institute of Consulting (IoC) in 2007. The IoC was founded as the Institute of Management Consultancy in 1962, changed its name to the Institute of Consulting in 2011 and currently has more than 7,000 members. Between them the CIM and IoC offer a range of consulting qualifications.
Institute of Value Management
We are a fully Approved Training Centre of the Institute of Value Management (IVM). The ICM is the UK’s professional body for Value Management / Value Engineering (VM/VE). Click here for more information about VM/VE. Click here for more information about VM/VE qualifications. Visit www.ivm.org.uk for more details.
Value for Europe
Through the Institute of Value Management we are fully accredited to deliver training under the Value for Europe (VfE) programme. VfE was developed to improve European competitiveness by establishing standards of performance and accrediting professionals in the application of VM methodologies. Visit www.ivm.org.uk/training-value.php for more details.
ELCAS
We are a fully Approved Training Centre by the Ministry of Defence under the Enhanced Learning Credits Administration Services (ELCAS) scheme for military and ex-military people wishing wish to develop their professional skills.
Dear Visitor,
Here are some resources to help you with your career and stimulate thought. We are passionate about CPD and regularly attend seminars by business leaders and academics at the world’s top business schools and professional bodies. Here are the main categories we have organised this growing collection of material under:
- Book summaries – get the gist of great books without the grind
- Event summaries – we report on fascinating events we have attended
- How to future proof your career – how to turn the verb into a noun!
- How to manage stress – embrace good stress and avoid the bad
- Useful technology tips – some ideas to improve your productivity
- Interesting developments in the world of consulting
- When the day is over – light hearted anecdotes from the world of consulting
Navigate via the ‘free resources’ widget on the right. We continuously update this site with content from our work as consultants, facilitators and trainers.
Enjoy!
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PS Click Share / Bookmark to forward a link to any article you think may be of interest to someone.
Institute of Directors
We run face-to-face courses at the Institute of Directors, London, UK and in-house or online.