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The idea for the Post-Graduate Certificate in Career Management Strategy (CCMS) initially came from the Academy of Business Strategy’s human resource related commercial client programmes. These were performance-related programmes that implemented processes which enabled client organizations to be more proactive about the way in which they planned, developed, implemented and managed human resource strategy with a view towards improving the return on human resource capital employed. The way in which these human resource processes achieved their goals was to enable key employees to see their own personal career development objectives as being synonymous with their employer’s corporate objectives. The result was improved performance for the client organization and improved promotion prospects for the employee. But there was another benefit which we did not anticipate. The employees in question became more proactive about the way in which they managed their own careers within the organization that they worked for. Consequently the client benefited because they tended to retain key staff for longer periods of time, more senior appointment opportunities were presented to those employees who were involved and the employees themselves were able to exceed their own career expectations. The critical success factor here was the fact that we were effectively empowering employees to obtain more control over the development and management of their own careers and many of the employees involved felt that this should subsequently constitute a separate post-graduate programme in its own right because the consequential benefit was so life-changing. So it was that the Post-Graduate Certificate and the corresponding Diploma in Career Management Strategy were born. The Certificate focuses upon career planning and development, the corresponding Diploma focuses upon career implementation and management. Only students who have graduated with the Certificate are eligible to apply to enrol upon the Diploma. As we started to focus upon the new core objective of enabling employees to be more proactive about the way in which they planned, developed, implemented and managed their own careers, without really considering the potential benefits this would have within the organizations that these employees worked for, the power of this particular programme started to emerge. The perceived disadvantage with many client programmes is that it is the organization that purchases the programme and the consequential training and processes that are implemented can be perceived as being inflicted upon the unsuspecting employees who see themselves as having no say in the matter and an already busy workload. This all changes of course once they begin to realize the personal benefits of being involved. However, the benefit of targeting the (CCMS) and (DCMS) at individuals rather than the organizations they work for, is that the individual decides for themselves to enrol upon the programme for personal career development reasons and thus the ownership and commitment from individuals is increased substantially because all of the service benefits are personal to them, regardless of the organization they work for and whether they decide to change employers during the programme. After undertaking our own research it surprised s just how few people actually had a personal career strategy plan and of those that had one very few were proactive or consistent in the way they were implementing it. The potential competitive advantage that (CCMS) and (DCMS) graduates would clearly have over their peers and work colleagues would subsequently be huge. The (CCMS) programme was established by the Academy of Business Strategy 14 years ago and it has a long established history of success. The programme itself has an 86 per cent graduation success rate and this has been sustained since the programme was first established. Interestingly enough the more income students were earning before they enrolled upon the programme, the higher their increase in annual income was after graduation. The theory behind this is the fact that those on lower salaries tend to need to allow more time to implement their new career development plans which is a reasonable assumption.