Professionalism and ethics in consulting

into new consulting approaches and methods, information on useful literature and on what goes on in other professions, reports on new trends in management and business and their implications for consulting, and so on.

As consulting is a young profession, all these activities should have a strong educational dimension, emphasizing professional ethics and behaviour as defined by the association’s code, in addition to strengthening technical skills.

6.4Certification and licensing

Whether and how to apply certification (accreditation) or licensing to management consultants is a notoriously controversial subject, debated not only in consulting firms and associations but also among users. This debate is indicative both of the professional aspirations and the growing sense of social responsibility of consultants, and of the various factors that operate against professionalization.

Certification, it is felt in some quarters, would be a step towards a wide recognition of management consulting as a true profession. Business, governments and the public at large want to have a guarantee that management consultants associated with important decisions in the private and public sectors are proven professionals. Certification should enhance the international position of management consulting and help it to compete with other professions, where certification is a long-established practice. It should put more order into the consulting business and help to separate the wheat from the chaff. Finally, certification should be applied to individuals, not to firms: “No true profession can be based on the qualifying of firms”, wrote in 1962 James Sandford Smith, Founding President of the United Kingdom Institute of Management Consultancy.

On the other hand, various objections are raised: that certification cannot guarantee anything more than the application of general and rather elementary criteria of admission to the profession; that it cannot show whether a consultant is actually suitable for a given job; and that, after all, consulting to business is itself a business and a consultant who passes the market test by finding enough clients does not need a paper certifying his or her competence.

Opponents of certification also evoke the difficulties involved in defining the scope of management consulting, the lack of a generally accepted body of knowledge, and the overlap between consulting and other professional sectors. Some larger firms contest the legitimacy of consulting institutes to certify their employees. At best they would agree to the certification of individuals who operate on their own, or to the certification of the firm which in turn would be entitled to certify its own employees.

Developments towards certification

Certification has, in fact, been making modest progress. In some 30 countries, the national management consulting institutes have introduced a voluntary certification procedure; a candidate who meets the criteria becomes a “certified

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Management consulting

Box 6.4 International model for consultant certification (CMC)

Requirements
Experience	Three years in management consulting
Education	Recognized degree or professional qualification
	or additional five years in management
	consulting in lieu of a degree
Time spent	1,200 hours per annum in active management
	consulting during the three qualifying years
	over the preceding five years and currently
	active in management consulting
Independence	Owner or employee of a firm in independent
	practice or internal consultant where currently
	eligible for admission to the institute
Qualification process
Examination	Written examination or structured interview to test
	knowledge of the code of professional conduct
	and common body of knowledge
Sponsors	Two sponsors who are full Members or Fellows
	(CMC, FCMC, MIMC, FIMC or equivalent)
References	Written descriptions of five assignments and five
	client references verified through interview
Designations
Designation	Professional designation exists
Retention	Member may retain designation even after
	leaving management consulting as long as he or
	she remains a member in good standing

Source: ICMCI (see www.icmci.com).

management consultant” (CMC). Alternatively, consultants must meet certain criteria to become full members of the institute; full membership is thus equal to certification.

To promote and standardize certification worldwide, the ICMCI has developed an international model (box 6.4) as a set of minimum requirements to be met by national certification procedures. The aim is to achieve international reciprocity among member institutes, whereby the certification awarded by one member institute would be recognized by other institutes participating in the scheme. To encourage consultancies employing large numbers of consultants to become interested in certification and start applying it to their own employees, the Institute of Management Consultancy in the United Kingdom and some other institutes have introduced the concept of “certified practice”. A consulting firm that becomes thus certified can decide

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