Coaching support

Administrative details

The award of the Certificate in Management Consulting Essential is based on the assessment of a dissertation that you submit to the Institute of Business Consulting (IBC). In order to take the assessment we must first register you with the IBC. The basis of assessment is that you complete the Assignment following the course within four weeks.

When you have completed the assignment, you should return it to us and we will then authenticate it and forward it to the Institute for assessment. If for some reason it is assessed as unsatisfactory, you can re-submit the assignment or substitute a new one on a further two occasions under this registration.

Completing the assignment

The fee that you have paid to attend the course also includes provision for some coaching support from the course tutor to support you in your completion of the assignment. This, however, requires your active participation too. The main work stages are:

Before the course: Read through the assignment and identify any areas that you believe are weak or on which you would like some clarification.
Early in the course, you will have the opportunity to state what you want from the course and you should make this known, so that the tutor can make sure that your needs are addressed
As you go through the course, make sure that the topics you want are being covered. If in doubt, discuss this with the course tutor
Before the end of the course, draft an assignment completion plan. This should show when you want to complete the answers for each of the questions in the assignment. Discuss this with the tutor before the end of the course and, with the tutor, plan the coaching support you want

Remember that the purpose of the assignment is not simply to create a submission for the purposes of gaining the Certificate; you should regard it as an opportunity to reflect on your own skills in consulting and how they might be best developed. In particular, you can use this work as a means of ensuring that you translate the learning from the course into practice back at work.

Completing the assignment should take you between one and two days work; for some people, it might take even longer, so you will need to make provision for this. The amount of time that you can expect from the tutor is in total about 3 4 hours, so you need to think how best to use this.

Most of the support will be given via email and telephone, probably in fairly short bursts only exceptionally do we think a face to face meeting will be necessary. The coaching programme that we recommend has milestones as follows:

Review 1 - outline draft: start to draft how you might answer all of the questions. See what queries you might have whether it is understanding the question or working out how best to answer it. When this has been done, use the Review 1 discussion with the tutor to clear up these points.

Review 2 - detailed draft: at this stage you should have decided what the main points are that you want to put in your assignment report. Use the Review 2 discussion to check any queries that you might have about the form or content of your response. You may want the tutor at this point to run over topics that were covered in the course on which you would like some refreshment.

Review 3 - assignment report review. You should send the draft of the report to your tutor for comment. The tutor will then review your report with you, to deal with any queries and also matters of clarity and accuracy.

Review 4 - final report. You should send the report to your tutor, who will then check that you have completed it satisfactorily before sending it on to the Institute for assessment.

You may also want to have the option of contacting your tutor on other occasions to deal quickly with any queries arising.

Note that it is essential that the assignment is your own work and for that reason, your tutor will not become involved in any rewriting or editing of your assignment, but simply be offering advice and comment, and dealing with questions that arise.

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