Consult In Europe

BACKGROUND

This project derives from the complementary needs expressed by the target groups, as identified by the project coordinating team and partners through their national and European networks and through earlier work linked to the theme of the project:

  1. The transferability of the competence and experience of senior managers (45 years and older) and heads of enterprises seeking to work in the Management Consulting (MC) sector, often when facing a serious career challenge, of identifying the key competences needed to work as a consultant, and of accessing the necessary training to remove obstacles to mobility. This situation has been recognised by professional associations in the sector, national and local, agencies supporting firm start-ups, and organisations involved in continuing professional development. The issues are confirmed by statistics maintained by organisations involved in validating experiential competences (although the level of information varies substantially between countries).
  2. The needs expressed by MC firms and their collaborators (professional associations and networks in the consulting sector):
    1. in competences and qualifications adapted to the specific needs of the MC sector;
    2. in increasing professionalism of consultants;
    3. and a greater visibility of evolution of qualifications in the sector.
  3. A third dimension must be added, arising from the social partners in the sector and supported by national and European strategies for lifelong learning, to reinforce the role of social dialogue in questions of vocational training.

These objectives are consistent with those of the Copenhagen Process, reinforced at the Maastricht summit in December 2004, and the foundations of the second phase of the Leonardo da Vinci Programme, notably concerning a sectoral approach and the role of social dialogue in vocational training, elements compatible with the development of the European Qualifications Framework. The exploitation of results is equally expected to produce a transferable catalogue of qualifications. The project also addresses the thematic priority of transparency of qualifications in the 2005 call for proposals. The MC sector is by definition a sector that continually evolves where, according to the country concerned, the specialist regions and domains of consultants, practice can be completely different.

Nevertheless, the social and professional representations of the occupation of consulting converge towards an idea more or less expressed in terms of required competence profiles and qualifications. To act in favour of transparency of qualifications in the MC sector will be, in the framework of the project, to succeed in defining beforehand the greatest possible consensus around a generic definition of the specifics of the work of consultant. For this reason, the participation in the project of the social partners, academic researchers and training centres for the MC sector fulfils the role of overcoming the obstacles to arrive at a notion of transparency of qualifications freely shared with the stakeholders in the sector, and evolving along with changes in the consulting sector and its principal client markets. This is the first priority for our project, since it is a quintessential condition to be able to propose training products adapted to the target groups without clashing with them, in the phase of exploitation and dissemination, given reservations of the end users of the results of the project.