Chartered status? Nice idea, but it won’t work

I read your feature ’Membership rewards’ (News Analysis, DW 4 February) regarding chartered designer status with great interest.

My company has recently finished a rebranding exercise for a client and we have now learned it intends to produce all its design in-house, based on our guidelines.

I am pretty sure the person who’ll produce this work does not have a degree in design, and the client said something about saving money.

Perhaps chartered status is just what we need to persuade this company to give this work to us instead.

Although if the client was not persuaded that it needed to use my consultancy for this work by our degrees, awards or reputation, would being chartered really help?

Personally, I don’t think this would lead to ’increased levels of trust from clients’, and to suggest that it would give ’a possible increase in turnover for individual chartered designers’ is, frankly, laughable.

Jim Richardson, Managing director, Sumo, by e-mail

This is certainly an interesting, ongoing debate, but let’s all ask ourselves the question, with all the effort being used to push chartered status through, will it really benefit designers (News Analysis, DW 4 February)?

I agree with Jim Richardson about ’increased levels of trust from clients’. I don’t think an industry accreditation scheme will help clients decide which consultancy should work on a brief – except maybe in the public sector, where briefs come with added red tape and hoops to jump through, so another criterion might help.

From a client’s point of view, accreditation won’t make much difference, unless consultancies conform to a fee-structure so clients feel they are getting a fair deal.

As for an ’increase in turnover’, that’d be nice, but I’ve never been asked by a client to show my degree, GCSEs or swimming badge before working with them, so will an extra accreditation make that much difference?

Steve Dwyer, Creative director, K4, by e-mail