Consulting Magazine's Top Consultants awards program celebrates outstanding achievements across a broad spectrum of consulting disciplines, recognizing individuals who drive outstanding transformative impact, innovation and leadership in their fields.
This year, the awards program has expanded its individual excellence categories and introduced a dedicated international track. These changes reflect the evolving nature of consulting work—where individual impact increasingly spans digital transformation, workforce innovation and cross-border complexity.
Note: Entries in the non-international categories may include international work but will not be considered for any international honors.
Recognizes consultants who architect and lead enterprise-wide strategies or transformation programs that reshape organizations, deliver measurable financial outcomes, and establish long-term competitive advantage. These professionals demonstrate vision, execution discipline, and the ability to align diverse stakeholders around bold change.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Quantifiable outcomes such as revenue growth, margin expansion, or cost reduction.
- Scope: Multi-function, enterprise-scale programs with executive sponsorship.
- Approach: Innovative frameworks, operating-model redesigns, or transformation roadmaps.
- Sustainability: Governance and KPIs embedded for lasting adoption.
- Evidence: Before/after metrics, sponsor endorsements, methodology artifacts.
Honors consultants who deliver transformative digital programs — from cloud migrations and ERP modernizations to customer-experience platforms — that enable clients to thrive in a digital-first economy. These leaders combine technical expertise with change management to ensure adoption and measurable ROI.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Documented productivity gains, cost savings, or customer improvements.
- Scope: Multi-phase implementations across platforms or integrations.
- Method: Agile, DevOps, human-centered design, or platform governance.
- Adoption: Evidence of user enablement and uptake.
- Evidence: Architecture diagrams, adoption dashboards, client testimonials.
Spotlights consultants who harness analytics and AI to deliver prescriptive insights, automate decision-making or create new business models. These professionals balance innovation with responsible practices, ensuring solutions are scalable, interpretable and trusted.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Quantified business outcomes from analytics or AI.
- Novelty: Innovative model design or deployment.
- Scale: Production-grade pipelines across functions.
- Responsibility: Governance, monitoring, and fairness safeguards.
- Evidence: Metrics, pipeline artifacts, client validation.
Celebrates consultants who streamline operations through Lean, Six Sigma, automation or process redesign. Their work reduces waste, improves quality, and builds client capability for continuous improvement.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Efficiency, cycle-time, or quality improvements.
- Method: Root-cause analysis, process mapping, automation.
- Change: Training, playbooks, governance structures.
- Sustainability: Metrics and ownership for ongoing improvement.
- Evidence: KPIs, process maps, client confirmation.
Recognizes consultants who design workforce strategies that prepare organizations for the future of work. These leaders drive reskilling, organizational redesign, and talent programs that improve retention, engagement and readiness for emerging challenges.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Improved retention, mobility, or skills uplift.
- Strategy: Workforce planning, competency frameworks, HR technology.
- Execution: Reskilling programs, talent marketplaces, role redesign.
- Accountability: Metrics and leader ownership.
- Evidence: Participation data, promotion/retention results, sponsor endorsements.
Honors consultants who dedicate expertise to nonprofit or public-sector initiatives, delivering measurable social outcomes under resource constraints. These professionals exemplify the profession’s commitment to community impact.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Quantified social outcomes.
- Commitment: Significant pro bono hours or sustained partnerships.
- Design: Tailored solutions with scalability.
- Capacity Building: Training or tools for long-term benefit.
- Evidence: Metrics, testimonials, deliverables.
Recognizes consultants who embed ESG principles into client strategies, operations, or investments. Their work delivers measurable environmental and social improvements while strengthening governance and accountability.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Emission reductions, social-value gains, governance improvements.
- Scope: ESG integration across operations or supply chains.
- Method: Materiality assessments, reporting frameworks, sustainable design.
- Governance: Targets, tracking, accountability mechanisms.
- Evidence: Baseline/endpoint metrics, frameworks, client validation.
Honors consultants whose research, frameworks, or publications influence industry practice and client outcomes. These professionals amplify consulting’s intellectual capital through recognized outlets and adoption in engagements.
Entry Criteria
- Reach: Publications or presentations in recognized forums.
- Adoption: Evidence of client or market uptake.
- Rigor: Data-backed insights or peer-reviewed work.
- Amplification: Downloads, citations, attendance, press coverage.
- Evidence: Publications, adoption case studies, metrics.
Awards consultants who deliver deep domain expertise within a specific vertical, creating tailored solutions and reusable assets that drive differentiated outcomes.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Industry-specific outcomes (compliance, product launch, market entry).
- Domain Rigor: Specialized knowledge of regulations and trends.
- Reusable Assets: IP, toolkits, or benchmarks.
- Client Trust: Sector-specific testimonials or long-term engagements.
- Evidence: Case studies, artifacts, endorsements.
Recognizes consultants who design and deploy cybersecurity and risk-technology solutions that reduce exposure and enable secure digital transformation.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Measurable risk reduction or resilience improvements.
- Scope: Controls across identity, data, cloud, or incident response.
- Innovation: Automation, secure-by-design, continuous monitoring.
- Sustainability: Governance, playbooks, upskilling programs.
- Evidence: Metrics, diagrams, client testimonial.
Honors consultants who operationalize DEI strategies into measurable organizational change, improving representation, equity, and inclusion while linking outcomes to business performance.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Representation, promotion, retention, pay equity, inclusion scores.
- Strategy: DEI tied to business objectives.
- Execution: Training, sponsorship, hiring calibration.
- Sustainability: Data tracking, governance, accountability.
- Evidence: Results, program materials, stakeholder confirmation.
Recognizes consultants who embed ethical guardrails into AI and data programs, ensuring transparency, fairness, and privacy while delivering business value.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Outcomes with fairness, explainability, or privacy protections.
- Governance: Responsible-AI frameworks and controls.
- Technical Rigor: Bias testing, provenance tracking, monitoring.
- Adoption: Education and decision frameworks.
- Evidence: Artifacts, governance documentation, metrics, attestations.
Celebrates an individual whose career contributions have profoundly shaped consulting practice, client success, and the profession’s culture. This award honors enduring impact, mentorship, and intellectual leadership.
Entry Criteria
- Career Impact: Multi-decade influence across clients and industry.
- Mentorship: Record of talent development and knowledge transfer.
- Thought Leadership: Enduring intellectual contributions.
- Reputation: Broad corroboration from peers and clients.
- Evidence: Career dossier, endorsements, examples of lasting IP.
Recognizes consultants who lead complex, multi-jurisdictional engagements, harmonizing regulatory, cultural, and operational differences to deliver cohesive outcomes across borders.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Measurable outcomes across multiple countries.
- Complexity: Navigated regulatory and cultural challenges.
- Coordination: Managed distributed teams and harmonized KPIs.
- Localization: Adapted methodologies to regional contexts.
- Evidence: Scope, governance model, stakeholder feedback.
Honors consultants whose work in Asia-Pacific markets advanced client outcomes, market growth, or regional capabilities through deep local insight and cross-border coordination.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Regional market gains or client outcomes.
- Expertise: Knowledge of local regulation and culture.
- Scale: Multi-market rollouts within Asia-Pacific.
- Sustainability: Partnerships or capability building.
- Evidence: Case studies, metrics, endorsements.
Recognizes consultants delivering transformative results across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, navigating diverse regulatory environments and cultural contexts.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Outcomes across multiple EMEA markets.
- Navigation: Tailored solutions for varied legal frameworks.
- Coordination: Regional networks and local teams.
- Evidence: Artifacts, testimony, KPIs.
Honors consultants who drive impactful client work across Latin America, adapting global methodologies to local economic and cultural contexts.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Market-entry success or measurable client outcomes.
- Adaptation: Tailored solutions for local conditions.
- Partnerships: Engagement with local stakeholders.
- Evidence: Case studies, metrics.
Recognizes individual consulting work in frontier or fast-growing markets where solutions must be highly adaptive and build local capability amid infrastructure or institutional constraints.
Entry Criteria
- Impact: Tangible client or community benefits in emerging economies (growth, access, capacity).
- Context Sensitivity: Design for low-resource settings and institutional realities.
- Sustainability: Capacity building and handoff plans for local ownership.
- Evidence: Impact metrics, beneficiary or client endorsements and replication potential.
Recognizes an individual consultant who provided exceptional leadership on a single cross-border engagement, delivering strategic clarity, technical excellence, and exemplary execution across multiple jurisdictions. This award honors a leader who navigated regulatory, cultural, and operational complexity to produce measurable client outcomes, built durable local capability, and demonstrated personal accountability for the project’s success rather than firm-level performance.
Entry Criteria
- Individual accountability: The nominee must have held a clearly defined leadership role (engagement lead, program director or equivalent) with demonstrable decision-making authority and day-to-day responsibility for delivery.
- Outcome: The project achieved measurable client value (financial, operational, access, resilience or social impact) attributable to the nominee’s leadership.
- Cross-border complexity: The engagement spanned two or more countries or distinct regulatory jurisdictions and required navigation of legal, tax, compliance or geopolitical constraints.
- Coordination and governance: The nominee established and led governance, stakeholder alignment, and integrated delivery across distributed teams, local partners or government stakeholders.
- Localization and capability building: Solutions were adapted to local contexts and included handoff plans, training, or IP to ensure sustainability and local ownership.
- Innovation and problem-solving: Demonstrated novel approaches to overcome cross-border constraints (technical, partnership or operational) that materially improved outcomes.
- Evidence: Submit relevant sponsor or client endorsements, governance artifacts, key metrics, and any supporting deliverables that show the nominee’s direct contribution.
Nomination/Submission SCORING Content Template
- Purpose: State the nominee, category, summary of value claim or achievement, and supporting statement for consideration of the award
- What changed and why it mattered; include before/after KPIs where applicable and one-line ROI or other resulting value statement.
- Summarize methodology, tools, governance, and/or any novel techniques; clarify the nominee’s leadership or technical role.
- Describe governance, training, templates, or repeatable IP that enable ongoing value and wider adoption.