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