Grace studied for the ChMC Award with her employer, Atkins, a member of the SNC-Lavalin Group, one of the world’s most respected design, engineering and project management consultancies.
Here speak she speaks about her experience of becoming Chartered in August 2020, saying:
“The ChMC award is an opportunity for our personal development, for the consulting industry as a whole and for our clients to recognise. It’s so important that we have a benchmark in our industry.
“The competency framework of this award provided a really good benchmark of standards, where individuals going through the process can reflect on where they are excelling and perhaps where more development is needed.”
“As a manager of Graduates, the ChMC Award allows me to inspire the pipeline of talent coming through the business – to motivate them towards a common goal and qualification, whatever path their development and consultancy career takes.
“Personally, it has given me a clear career path and demonstrated the value of our profession, something that has always been difficult to articulate to those that are not in our industry. It has provided me with confidence as a management consultant of the standards and impact of our profession. It has given me a clear career path and demonstrated the value of our profession.”
There’s never a simple nine to five of consultancy, going through the award did however give me a good reason to pause and reflect on personal development. It’s too easy to keep going without accounting for milestones in your career or some of the smaller achievements of the day-to-day.
My employer has been incredibly supportive of the workload associated to gaining this award, making sure I get the time for personal development and I have used my mentor and leadership networks to better understand the gaps I needed to better align.
“It made me realise how much Atkins values the talent in the business, providing the time and investment to support individual accreditation.”
Consultancy itself attracts a diverse skill set, with staff from different backgrounds and experiences entering the industry at different stages of their careers. Not only will this award help others understand the different skills sets we bring to the industry, but we might also see some benefit in the ‘job’ versus ‘career’ lifecycle.
When looking at the requirements for Chartership, the years of experience aspect will, over time, encourage a more uniform set of consulting responsibilities that drive the continual development of management consulting. I’m certainly looking forward to being a part of this development in our industry.