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.
Click here for LinkedIn profile.
Professional Certifications
Click for the Big Picture
Over the past decade the proverbial ‘job for life’ has virtually disappeared. Even in ‘secure’ professions, such as medicine, tenured positions are vanishing as short term contracts become the norm.
The big challenge facing each of us has evolved from career choice to career resilience. How can I remain attractive to potential clients and employers? In short, ‘how can I future-proof my career?’
Here are some insights to help you strengthen your position in the workplace, i.e. turn your career from a verb into a noun. I hope you find them useful.
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.
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
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
OK, so you’ve met the requirements of your boss or client. You’ve done a diligent piece of work, you’ve interacted well with them and they seem pleased with the results. But is this enough to stop the axe falling during the next downturn (if you are employed) or cause the phone to ring with the next engagement (if you are a consultant)? Continue reading
Whenever a client or employer is thinking about engaging you they are placing a bet. You may have got your first job out of college purely on the basis of your hard-won degree and an ability to blag but thereafter you are a walking wager. Each of us carries a large invisible sign saying “Place your bets here – this guy has the potential to make or lose you a fortune!”.
So how do we make ourselves attractive in a competitive world? Continue reading
How good are you at thinking on your feet?
- You meet a Chief Executive at a networking event. How do you do business with them?
- You are facilitating a workshop and some smart-ass asks you a difficult question. How do you handle it?
- You are leading a team of experts. How do you steer them?
- You are dealing with a difficult person. How do you quickly win them over?
- You are about to be mugged. What should you do next?
Professional qualifications and memberships are a proven way to increase earnings. A survey by London Economics, a well respected consultancy, found that on average professional qualifications and memberships added £152,000 to lifetime earnings. Continue reading
Believe it or not, the most effective performance enhancing drug is free, 100% legal and available to everyone. Moreover, with the right choices and a little practice and care, most of us can use it to excel at our chosen activities. Continue reading
…or the importance of personal appearance.
Some years ago a good friend of mine successfully applied for a job with the Essex Chapter of the Hells Angels. He did this despite not meeting any of their normal entry requirements: Continue reading
Institute of Directors
We run face-to-face courses at the Institute of Directors, London, UK and in-house or online.