Mark Law, Lead Tutor
Expert consulting practitioner & career mentor with extensive industry knowledge & experience.
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Professional Certifications
Click for the Big Picture
In recent years management consulting has rapidly grown into a major business. With the advent of the Certified Management Consultant (CMC) qualification it is now evolving into a profession.
Here are a series of insights about some of the issues affecting the profession. I hope you find them interesting and 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
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
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
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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.
Profiting from Evidence-based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton
This book is a timely reminder that management should be based on sound scientific principles yet in the real world it is anything but. Evidence Based Management (the authors’ updating of ‘scientific management’) is a loud wake-up call to senior executives and their consultants to apply scientific thinking whenever they launch a new business initiative. Continue reading
Whenever we choose a doctor, dentist or solicitor we insist on a fully qualified professional. Indeed, the thought of engaging a non-qualified person doesn’t even enter our heads. Why then do clients rarely question the qualifications of their consultants or their ethics?
To find out more read my article published in the Spring 2009 edition of London Business School’s ‘Business Strategy Review’. Download your copy now.
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
Institute of Directors
We run public courses at the Institute of Directors, London, UK and in-house or online.