An International Community of Risk Managers

Serbia, Ukraine, Latvia, Russia, Lithuania …no, not the voting bloc from the Eurovision Song Contest, but just some of the countries from which students have recently enrolled to take the IRM’s International Certificate in Risk Management. All in all, over 25% of our new Certificate students are from outside the UK, and these international students come from 24 different countries. The areas most interested in the qualification are Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa (mainly South Africa but also Kenya and Uganda) and the Caribbean. Many students are sponsored by their employers but others make considerable personal sacrifices in order to obtain their qualifications and enhance their career prospects. The common factors about where the qualifications are most popular appear to be an acceptance of English as the business language and a respect – hopefully deserved – for the quality of a qualification based in the UK (albeit with input from an international faculty).

Our Certificate and Diploma have always been distance learning qualifications with exams available around the world, but in the past year IRM has taken two major steps to enhance further their international applicability: the content of both has been thoroughly reviewed in order to maximise its relevance to risk professionals around the world and we’ve come into the digital age with all required reading now available as downloads from our student web pages. Whereas books are still extremely valuable to the student (and practitioner) of risk management, we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties faced by students in areas where postal services are limited and library facilities difficult to access. In any case, we may all soon be reading our books electronically: Amazon last year unveiled its electronic book reader, the Kindle, which has recently been reported* to be a runaway success in the US, taking 6% of book sales where books were available in both electronic and traditional form and leading to speculation that it could eventually do what the i-pod has done for the music industry and turn the publishing and bookselling business model upside-down. We are watching with interest.

It was clear from the presentations at the recent CIR Risk Horizons conference that the most powerful emergent risks like climate change, terrorism, information security and global economic instabilities affect all countries. IRM receives approaches every week from individuals and organisations from all parts of the world seeking assistance in learning about or teaching about risk. As a relatively small organisation we simply cannot currently respond to each and every one but there is clearly a huge appetite internationally to learn about risk management and build a professional network. Those of us living in a country where this is relatively easy should reflect on how fortunate we are.

Carolyn Williams

Development Manager

The Institute of Risk Management

January 2009

This article first appeared in CIR Magazine

* The Sunday Times, 8 June 2008