How to apply

The Consultancies Panel of the Professional Affairs Board (PAB) reviews applications for consultancies to become registered with the IEHF as "approved vendors". The Panel reviews each application to determine whether the claims made within it are appropriate given the experience presented on the application form. That means the application form is the sole means by which a consultancy can be approved for registration in the Register.

When completing the form it is important to remember that the Institute is registering the consultancy - it is not registering you as an individual. Admission to the Register is assessed by the consultancy demonstrating a track record of experience in the areas of competence being claimed. The Panel will review the information provided to determine whether the claims being made about competence are reasonable and may request more information before a decision on acceptance is made.

The Panel therefore needs to understand more about what the consultancy has done, rather than what your personal experience is. What this means is that if you have spent 10 years as an employee of British Aerospace, working on Eurofighter, you can't really claim Eurofighter as experience for your consultancy.

The assessment process reviews the projects that you have entered as experience during the period the consultancy has been operating, and links those back to the competencies being claimed. If there is no evidence in the experience section that describes the work undertaken to achieve the competencies claimed, the competence cannot be assessed and will be removed from the application. Furthermore, the Panel is also forming a judgment based on the cited experience about the organisation's competence as a consultancy - how it delivers work, the quality systems in place, client management and so forth.

Remember, when completing the form:

• Choose the competencies you wish to claim carefully
• Describe the technical approach you took in delivering the project
• Show the links in the description of your experience to the competencies
• Describe how the deliverables that you contributed to achieved the competency

Read the registration criteria.

For the application form go to the application page