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JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH



Coaching skills – coaching is very often used in the
process consulting, where client looks for the consultant’s
help to improve his/her own performance. The principle is
that a consultant – in the role of a coach – observes and
supervises individual performance of a client, provides
him/her with a feedback on problems or behaviour
stereotypes that constitute barriers to working efficiency
and prevents a change to which a consulting process is
oriented towards. At the same time, it helps the client gain
new knowledge and skills which the character of his/her
work requires.



Management competencies – within consulting, one of the
key roles is being played by the project management as
well. It is a process, which uses specific principles and
techniques. In current consulting practice, project
management has a prevalining tendency. Consulting
companies should have experienced consultants whose
results and abilities qualify them for the posts of project
managers. Their competencies also include negotiations on
the preparations of new projects, preparation of initial
overview of a client, coordination of the preparation of an
offer for a client and finally, preparation of their own
project. Interdisciplinary consulting projects should have
been managed by experienced consultants and functional
projects, on the other hand, by experts in the respective
field (marketing, finances, production etc.). As it is time-
consuming, high self-discipline and self-control is
immensely significant in project management [20]. Besides
project management, the ability of a consultant to manage
and organize time, i.e. time management, is very important.



Decision-making competencies – there are many more
skills and competencies which create or should create a
part of professional equipment of every consultant. We
mention decision-making competencies that are important
for a consultant regarding his/her own performance and
services provided to a client, as one of them. Consulting
process is constantly accompanied by the growth of
number and complexity of decision-making problems
which have to be rationally and effectively solved. Besides
generally known complexity and demanding character,
those problems are characterized primarily by inconvenient
structure, lack or complete absence of unbiased
information, weak ability to get formalized and uniqueness
– in a sense they can not be repeated. Usually there are
several options how to solve the given problem. It depends
on the consultant’s abilities and skills to pick the solution
that would be the best for a client and beneficial for his/her
company. By means of a decision, the consultant can
achieve the situation that is desired. Within consulting,
delegative decision-making can be applied. In that case, a
consultant passes the decision-making competence and
authority on to a client. Consultant’s conclusions have the
character of recommendations. In such cases, he/she
usually acts as an external decision-making subject.

Consultants are innovators and creative professionals who have
acquired the newest knowledge, technologies and trends and are
aware of different approaches towards achieving desired goals.

Research in the sphere of consultants’ education in
management, marketing and environmental consulting
in Slovakia

3.1 Research project

Education of a consultant as a provider of consulting services
definitely does not end with a basic university graduation. Many
consulting companies have created a corporate education
strategy based on systematic and continual effort to improve
qualification, professionality and professional competencies of
their teams. We focused on the above mentioned in our research
that we carried out in 2018.

Our research dealt with the education of consultants in the field
of management, marketing and environmental consulting,
whereas in case of marketing consulting we drew from its
classification into general (i.e. consulting on a strategic level,
e.g. marketing audit, marketing diagnostics, marketing strategy

etc.) and specialized consulting (i.e. consulting on operational
level, e.g. marketing communication, marketing survey, online
marketing etc.).

In the field of environmental consulting, we worked with two
types of its providers:



Consulting companies which have been providing it within
the management and marketing consulting (e.g. circular
business models, environmental marketing etc.).



Consulting companies which have been providing it on the
technical basis only (e.g. assessment of the impact of the
building works on the environment, environmental
monitoring of noise, air etc.).

A part of the sample was comprised of a group of consulting
companies which provide consulting in all fields we mentioned
(combined consulting). The research was carried out in two
stages.

3.2 Quantitative survey

In the first stage, that took place in Febuary and March 2018, we
initially carried out a quantitative survey. We reached out to 200
companies, providing services in management, marketing and
environmental consulting in the territory of the Slovak Republic.
In the survey, 146 companies (n=146) of the following structure
(table

№1) took part:

Table 1: Overview of respondents according to their specialty

SPECIALTY

QUANTITY

Managerial consulting

Marketing consulting, specifically:

General marketing consulting

Specialized marketing consulting

Environmental consulting (technical activities
only)

Combined consulting (all three fields)

In total

146

Source: authors’ own processing

Respondents were executive directors or directors of the
addressed consulting companies. All respondents who marked
management consulting (48) and marketing consulting (38) as
the core business in the questionnaire stated that they also deal
with environmental aspects of management and marketing.
Those who marked the environmental consulting only (24) stated
that when solving environmental tasks within their consulting
activities, they only deal with technical activities. Combined
consulting services in all three fields of our research were
provided by 36 consulting companies.

Regarding the size, microenterprises (employing 9 people at
maximum), small businesses (with 10 to 49 employees) and
medium-sized businesses (with 50 to 100 employees) were

represented in the sample, as shown in the table №2.

Table 2: Overview of the respondents regarding their size

CATEGORY

QUANTITY

Microenterprise

Small business

Medium-sized business

In total

146

Source: authors’ own processing

From the total sample of 146 respondents, 103 were Slovak
consulting companies and 43 were foreign (those included
branches and affiliates of foreign consulting companies)
structured as follows (table

№3).

Table 3: Overview of the respondents according to the country
of origin

SPECIALTY

ORIGIN

Domestic

operators

Foreign

operators

Management consulting

Marketing consulting, specifically:

General marketing consulting

Specialized marketing consulting

Environmental consulting (technical activities only)

Combined consulting (all three fields)

In total

103

Source: authors’ own processing

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