There Is No Business Partnering Competency in the CGMA Framework

If you are mapping a finance team's development against the CGMA Competency Framework and looking for business partnering, you will not find it. The phrase does not appear anywhere in the document. The capability is there, under a different name, in a knowledge area most people would not think to look in.

What the framework actually contains

The document is the CGMA Competency Framework, 2023 Update, first published in April 2014. It is built on five knowledge areas, each with competencies defined at four proficiency levels: foundational, intermediate, advanced and expert.

The five areas are technical skills, business skills, people skills, leadership skills and digital skills. Their sizes differ considerably. Technical skills is the only two-tier area, running eight competency groups each containing named sub-competencies: financial accounting and reporting; cost accounting and management; business planning; management reporting and analysis; corporate finance and treasury management; risk management and internal control; accounting information systems; and tax strategy, planning and compliance.

Business skills has eight flat competencies: strategy, business models, market and regulatory environment, process management, business relations, business ecosystems management, project management and macroeconomic analysis. People skills has four: influence, negotiation and decision-making, communication, and collaboration and partnering. Leadership skills has five: team building, coaching and mentoring, driving performance, motivating and inspiring, and change management. Digital skills has six: information and digital literacy, digital content creation, problem-solving, data strategy and planning, data analytics, and data visualisation.

Where business partnering actually lives

It is collaboration and partnering, and it sits under people skills, not business skills. That placement is counter-intuitive and worth stating, because the obvious guess is wrong.

The competency is described as the ability to establish relationships and cross-functional partnerships within and outside of the organisation using a range of collaborative tools to create value for the business. Its descriptors use the noun business partners throughout, which is why the capability is unmistakable even though the gerund never appears.

At foundational level the three descriptors are to establish relationships and credibility with business partners, to analyse needs of business partners, and to acknowledge different priorities between finance and the business partners.

At expert level the four are to drive cross-functional initiatives across the business that create value, to leverage a broader network across the business and externally, to evaluate digital tools and technologies for collaborative processes, and to protect the organisation's digital reputation.

That is a clean and quite demanding progression: from establishing credibility and merely acknowledging that finance and the business want different things, to driving value-creating initiatives across an internal and external network. The intervening rungs fill it in. Intermediate opens with maintaining and enhancing effective cross-functional business partnerships through demonstrated integrity, and with influencing outcomes and challenging appropriately using fact-based data. Advanced opens with leading cross-functional business initiatives and encouraging the team to cultivate relationships across the business, and with driving a collaborative culture and joint accountabilities across multiple stakeholders.

Anyone writing a development plan should note what separates intermediate from foundational there. It is not more relationships. It is challenging appropriately, on evidence.

What business relations is instead

The competency under business skills that looks like it should be partnering is business relations, and it is not. Its descriptors are largely about stakeholders and contracts, running from understanding typical contracts and legal agreements used in the business unit at foundational level to negotiating and developing complex contracts and agreements at expert level.

So a mapping exercise that puts business partnering under business skills, against business relations, will produce development objectives about contract negotiation for someone who needs to learn to influence a commercial decision. The two are not substitutes.

There is a genuine quirk here that will trip any mapping table. Influence, under people skills, and business relations, under business skills, are described with exactly the same sentence: the process of establishing and managing both internal and external relationships to meet organisational objectives and governance responsibilities. Their proficiency descriptors are completely different, one interpersonal and one contractual. If you quote either description, do not present it as uniquely identifying that competency.

The framework's own framing

The only place the framework uses the language of partnering outside that competency is in its narrative on the structure of the finance function, where it observes that finance professionals are operating as business partners, embedding themselves in different areas of the organisation, engaging with those outside of finance more frequently and seeking to influence decisions and actions more directly.

That is context for the whole framework rather than a competency, and it should be cited as such. Three other terms people search for are absent entirely: commercial acumen, stakeholder management, and business partnering itself.

What the framework is not

One correction that matters more than the naming, because it affects compliance rather than vocabulary. The CGMA Competency Framework has no formal role in anyone's CPD obligation.

The document never uses the term CPD or continuing professional development, in any of its seventy-odd pages. It imposes no hours requirement. And it is not referenced in the CIMA Royal Charter, Bye-laws and Regulations, whose Regulation 13 binds members to CIMA's CPD guidance rather than to the framework. We set this out in full in our piece on why CIMA sets no CPD hours but fines members who cannot produce records.

So a claim that CIMA members must map their CPD to the competency framework is unsupported on the published sources. What the framework is, on its own terms, is a self-assessment and career-planning tool offered alongside the CPD obligation. That makes it genuinely useful for structuring development, and useless as an answer to a monitoring request.

How to use it properly

Three practical points. Assess against named competencies rather than knowledge areas, because the areas are far too broad to plan against and the technical area is two-tiered while the others are not. Expect partnering development to sit in people skills, and treat contract capability as a separate thread under business skills. And record the proficiency level you are targeting, not just the competency, since the levels are where the framework does its actual work: the gap between acknowledging that finance and the business differ and challenging them on evidence is the whole of a business partner's development.

If the purpose of the exercise is to evidence CPD rather than to plan it, the framework will not do that job, and the requirements that will are the ones your body actually imposes. The differences between those are larger than most people assume, as our comparison of ACCA and CIMA CPD shows, and where any of them come from is covered in our explainer on IES 7. The framework itself is published by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, and should be cited as the 2023 Update rather than a 2023 edition, since April 2014 is its first publication date.