The CMC Oral Assessment is the final step in your certification journey. It’s a two-hour experiential exam with two senior Certified Management Consultants to confirm you have the necessary lived competency experience to be a CMC. Below are a few tips to help you prepare for your assessment.
- Attend the Oral Assessment Preparation Course provided by CMC-Canada. This session is full of excellent tips and provides insights into exam questions and preparation techniques, all within a highly collaborative peer learning environment.
- Prepare Your Stories. The exam is all about storytelling – sharing your experiences to confirm ‘lived competency’ expected of a CMC. Questions will almost always start with ‘Tell me about a time when . . . ‘ Assessors are not looking for your thoughts on theory, they want to ensure you have the ‘been there, done that' t-shirt.
The single best way to prepare is to download a copy of the CMC Competency Framework. For each competency, write down the story that best showcases your experience.- Stories do not have to be limited to Engagement Summaries, or even your consulting career. Assessors are looking for strong proof of lived competency, regardless of when it occurred during your career.
- Feel free to share as much detail as you’d like, but we recommend you mask elements such as client name to maintain client confidentiality. Assessors are bound by the CMC Code of Professional Conduct, and additionally have signed a confidentiality agreement specific to your interview.
- Expand on tools and methods used during your stories. Weaving in links to CMC Code of Professional Conduct does not hurt either.
- Be succinct. Each question only allows for ~8.5 minutes of storytelling, including follow up questions from Assessors.
- Although a candidate may bring and share work examples to reinforce storytelling, the exam moves quickly and there is not a lot of time for deliverable review. Due to confidentiality, candidates are not allowed to send copies of work deliverables to Assessors. It’s better to focus on preparing excellent stories that showcase your lived competency.
- No one has done everything. If you run into a competency you do not have a lot of experience in, consider your plan to build experience in that competency, and come prepared to discuss. If you find you do not have stories for a large number of competencies, it may be wise to postpone your exam and seek additional consulting experience. Feel free to write down your ideas and bring them to your exam. The best exams start with the candidate responding to a question with: ‘Oh – I have a great story for this one!’
- Leverage Your Sponsor. In most jurisdictions, candidates are assigned a CMC Sponsor to support them throughout the process. They are a great resource and may even offer a brief session prior to your formal exam to test some of your stories and provide constructive feedback.
At the end of the day, candidates should take the process seriously, but a well-prepared candidate with excellent stories creates a super-enjoyable experience for all parties. We want you to be successful and look forward to having you as a member of our awesome global CMC community!
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