BARBADIANS and other Caribbean people are losing out on a significant portion of the "big bucks" which international donors such as the World Bank are making available under management consultant contracts in the region. President of the Caribbean Institute of Certified Management Consultants (CICMC), Dennis Strong, made this assertion last Friday. As much as 80 per cent of consulting fees paid out in this area go to extra-regional consultants, Strong calculated. This was because jobs were only circulated to certified management consultants and, even if Caribbean consultants did get hired, it was in a secondary capacity, he explained. While he conceded that the Caribbean had a shortage of certified management consultants, he urged governments to think of better ways to capture and retain the millions of dollars available in the region for consultancies. "Consulting globally is a multi trillion-dollar-a-year industry," he told the WEEKEND NATION. "Yet when you look at the export development plans, it's not even on the radar as a sector that we are going to try to take advantage of." Strong and secretary of the (CICMC), Donald Wood, have been encouraging regional consultants to seek certified management consultant status through the entity set up earlier this year. Wood said this internationally recognised certification would put regional consultants in line for more of the big contracts being offered by bodies such as the United Nations and the Canadian International Development Agency. He also argued that countries were better served by having local consultants on board because of the knowledge and connections they had as well as their standing in the society. "Indigenous consultants have to stay here and live with the results, whereas the foreign consultants do the project and they're gone," he commented. "Local consultants could also embody a lot of the knowledge and technology that is developed in the course of the project and keep it here." The institute was launched last January. According to Strong, it is affiliated with the Canadian Association of Management Consultants and has the University of the West Indies as its accrediting body. It would weed out those who were only posing as consultants and discrediting the profession, he said. In order to be certified, a consultant would have to provide services full-time - at least 1 500 hours per year; hold a degree or a recognised equivalent body of knowledge that could be examined; be able to provide case studies based on the work carried out, and be prepared to be tested on the code of ethics and practice of the profession. (TY)
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