A submarine floats into harbour

The scandals which brought down the European Commission of Jacques Santer in 1999 were a catastrophe for him and his team, most famously Edith Cresson, and her friend Renée Berthelot, the dentist and soi-disant AIDS expert.

Less publicised was the ensuing panicked purge of outside consultants known as ‘submarines’.

"I was out of work for a year," says Carmen Peter, a mathematician who had by then established herself as an expert adviser. She had left Bucharest in 1991 on a tourist visa.

A divorcee, she educated her two children in an international school while teaching in secondary schools, then took a further degree in international relations at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her break was a job with a small Danish consultancy.

In those days she was a rarity, an expert on Romania who also spoke perfect French and English. By the time of the 1999 events she was well-established, but does not complain about the upset: "I need a push from behind. If not, I’m tempted to stay perfectly happy doing whatever I’m doing."

Her restart after 1999 was helped not just by her resilience. Her saviour, albeit indirectly, was the then commissioner Neil Kinnock, who survived the Santer shipwreck, and went on to initiate the famous, if not always well thought-out, ‘Kinnock reforms’.

They created a boom in training and coaching, with multi-million-euro training contracts. They have introduced into Brussels’s bureaucratic life things like ‘away-days’ to forge team spirit, and personal and group character analysis using such methods as Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and Transactional Analysis.

None of them holds any mysteries for Peter; they are her stock-in-trade as a coach/trainer for the European institutions working for one of the contractors. She is up to speed with the latest management literature, indeed devours it. "You are a last-minute type," she tells me as soon as we meet.

Her main and crucial qualification, she says, is not the courses that she has done, but her more than 15 years of experience in Brussels. "If you work closely with officials in so many different levels of authority and fields of responsibility you learn how things really work here."

Her job involves inspiring team spirit in the highest reaches of the Council of Ministers and the Commission on the increasingly common one or two-day away-days, training in public speaking, time-management, negotiating, assertiveness, career development, and how to choose the right candidates for different jobs.

She has recently begun a sideline preparing candidates for the dreaded multiple-choice concours to make it onto the lower rungs of the European institutional ladder. The preparation starts with verbal and numerical reasoning, up to the oral exam and a guide through the hazards of selection interviews.

She takes a refreshingly worldly view of how far her clients believe in the European vision: "Whatever their personal motivation, they are all very driven to contribute to the accomplishment of the European dream."

But are they the right people to do it? In her view the concours tends to weed out not just second-raters, but the more considerate sort of candidate. "It does favour a particular kind of personality, speedy people, which means that the thorough, thoughtful types so much needed in some sectors have a harder time getting through."

• What’s on offer: coaching is gaining in credibility, and moving towards internationally recognised qualifications. European certificates in business and management coaching can be gained on short courses (as little as seven days) or longer ones (up to one year), at institutes in the UK and France. But be warned: many of these are fly-by-night operations cashing in on a fashion.

• How much will I earn? Established coaches with 20 years’ experience (in the UK or US) can expect to earn in excess of €100,000 a year, but for those trying to make it as freelancers, the early years can be hard, even hungry.

• Individual preparation for the concours: fees range from €50 to €150 an hour.

• Carmen Peter can be contacted at carmen_peter@gmail.com

The scandals which brought down the European Commission of Jacques Santer in 1999 were a catastrophe for him and his team, most famously Edith Cresson, and her friend Renée Berthelot, the dentist and soi-disant AIDS expert.

• Primary Source