Chartered Management Consultant CPD Sampling

By applying for ChMC status you made a commitment to your ongoing professional development as a management consultant in order to ensure that you have the necessary knowledge and skills to meet the challenges of your role.  The CMI Code of Practice states that adherence to the code, which includes an ongoing commitment to self-development, is a fundamental requirement of CMI membership.

We recommend that all CMI members maintain a record of their CPD plans and activities. In your application to become a Chartered Management Consultant you were asked to submit evidence of your CPD to support your application, and every year a sample of Chartered Management Consultants will be asked to submit their records for assessment.

We recommend that good CPD is based on the following 4 stage cycle of Reflection, Planning, Action and Evaluation.

Sometimes learning can occur unexpectedly through experience, i.e. it may start at the Action stage rather than with Reflection, but it is essential that all management consultants regularly reflect on how their knowledge and skills need to be updated and plan how they will achieve this.

A ChMC CPD Submission Document is provided for you to record and submit your CPD.

Anything that increases your knowledge and skills in a way that makes you a more effective management consultant can be considered valid CPD. An effective CPD activity must have a clear learning outcome (an output) that is independent of the activity itself (the input).

It is not just about attending formal training courses.  Informal learning gained through experience in the workplace can also be extremely important, as can self-directed learning.

Valid CPD activities can include the following:

Attending events
Conferences
Seminars/webinars
Exhibitions
Networking events
Structured learning

Embarking upon, working towards and completing a qualification
Training courses, including in-company programmes
Tests
Informal or self-directed learning
Reading journals, books, research papers etc
Viewing multimedia resources e.g. videos,  e-learning etc
Coaching and mentoring
Experiential or “on-the-job” learning
Voluntary and other activities

We recommend that effective CPD should be multi-faceted, i.e. include a range of different activities that include self-directed study and opportunities to learn from other people in both formal and informal settings.

CMI’s approach is to focus on the impacts and outputs from CPD rather than on inputs. What this means is that we are interested in what has actually been learnt or achieved by completing development activities rather than in measuring them in terms of the hours they took or by awarding points for completion. For example, you may attend a training course that is two days long from which you learn nothing new. Alternatively, you may gain an invaluable insight that will increase your professional effectiveness from watching a 5-minute video or having a brief conversation with a colleague.

So whilst some other professional bodies do measure CPD in terms of points or hours, CMI does not.

Every year a sample of Chartered Management Consultants will be asked to submit their records for assessment. Therefore it is vital that CPD records are kept up-to-date throughout the year.

We anticipate the sample size will be around 10% of all Chartered Management Consultants excluding those awarded within the last twelve months.

Please note: We reserve the right to request CPD records from any Chartered Management Consultant at any time. The fact of having been asked to submit records during one year does not provide any exemption for subsequent years.

Our assessors will be looking for:

Reflection on development needs

Planning of activities to meet these needs (although not all learning has to be planned)

Action in the form of a variety of developmental activities

Evaluation of the learning outcomes of these activities and their impact at work

We ask for records to be submitted within 30 days of our request. If records are not received after CMI has sent reminders and taken reasonable steps to contact the individual concerned then, in the absence of any reasonable mitigating circumstances, we would remove Chartered status and downgrade the individual’s membership accordingly.

If CPD records submitted do not, in our assessor’s view, meet CMI’s requirements then the assessor will contact the Chartered Management Consultant concerned and explain their reasons. The individual will then be asked to re-submit their records taking into account the assessor’s feedback. Should a second submission still fail to meet CMI’s requirements, and in the absence of any reasonable mitigating circumstances, then we would remove Chartered status and downgrade the individual’s membership accordingly.