If you’re going to bet, bet on yourself.
If you’ve spent more than an hour, or two glasses of wine, around me, you’ll probably be well aware that my intended career path took an unexpected turn at a very early stage.
In brief, I had hoped to become an engineer of some sort, following roughly in the footsteps of my dad and grandad. As a family, we worked hard to convince my high school to let me choose GCSE options to reflect that goal and set me on my way to a polytechnic (you might need to google that).
This was in the mid-80s in a northern commuter town and – while history likes to pretend it was all shoulder pads and womens’ empowerment at that time – in fact there were still some hurdles to overcome if you were a girl and wanted to do boy stuff for a living.
Shortly before my 13th birthday, my dad had a massive heart attack and died.
The following years were difficult and confusing, not just for me but for my whole family. The ripple effect of something so destabilising happening to an already weird kid at that age can’t be underestimated.
Fast forward to GCSE time, I’d already pretty much left school of my own volition a year or so earlier and was finding it hard to figure out what to do next.
Enter the 80s answer to wayward teens’ need for beer and fag money, and local businesses’ desire to not pay their staff: the YTS.
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Much of my early career was spent hacking around local small businesses, trying to be useful, learning a lot – about work, yes, but about people more so.
I moved around the north west, then down to the south east and later halfway home, to the Midlands. Over time, I built up skills and experience, honed my intuition, learned to see behind the curtain, and gradually began to draw clearer edges around my fuzzy work catalogue, forming it into something resembling a career.
Ever restless, I strove to become a solid interim manager, mostly in marcomms of some type. This let me move around with purpose (although some days it definitely didn’t feel like that), building up knowledge, adding skills where I had gaps.
When I eventually went completely solo, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and who I wanted to do it for: Help SMEs grow.
If you’d have told me at the time that the name for this was ‘Management Consultant’ I’d have laughed you out of the room. Or at least given you one of these 🤨
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As it happens, that is what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. And, while all that moving about, and chopping and changing in the couple of decades before that may have seemed entirely random from the outside, from my perspective, it was very deliberate.
Not always planned in advance – sometimes opportunities present themselves in unexpected ways and you just have to make a leap – but always with the aim of, one day, showing 13 year old me that she wasn’t a write-off.
That she was smart.
That she did have something to offer.
And still weird, yes, but these days I embrace that 😁
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The Chartered Management Consultant Experienced Professional route was developed precisely for people who haven’t necessarily ‘come up’ through management consulting in the traditional way.
It’s not a cake walk: you need to rigorously prove your impact, ethics, commitment and more against a stringent competency framework, through both written evidence and an in-depth professional discussion with an established Chartered Management Consultant.
More than anything, the process makes you really think. About yourself, your values, your past and your future.
I’m proud of past Lyndsey, for refusing to be written off, for consistently throwing herself into the unknown, for never giving up.
I’m proud of her for sticking to her principles, even when it meant taking a step back.
I’m proud of her for making her business all about helping other people grow their businesses.
I’m pretty sure that, today, she’s just as proud of me.
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The Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) award recognises consistent and high level professional competence and achievement, and was created in partnership between the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), the trade association for the UK’s leading consulting firms, and the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), the UK’s leading chartered professional body for management and leadership.
The ChMC competency framework provides a benchmark of the skills and behaviours of management consultants. By becoming Chartered, consultants have an independent professional stamp of approval on not only their measurable skills and experience, but their commitment to both the industry and to their own high-quality work.
Being Chartered means that you have the highest standards of expertise, ethics and delivery in the profession.
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#CharteredConsultant #ConsultingExcellence #ManagementConsulting
Chartered Management Institute
Management Consultancies Association
Link to the Chartered section on the MCA website: https://www.mca.org.uk/chartered-management-consultant-award
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AI Disclaimer: All hyphens, em-, en- and other dashes and punctuation are the authors own 😏
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