Chartered Director

Nothing prepared me for founding and running a start-up. Product, go-to-market, hiring, finding clients, raising finance, keeping the business afloat: all of it landed at once, and much of it landed on me alone.

By the end of the second year I had reached my limit. I was sitting in endless meetings with accountants and advisers who seemed to speak a different language and run on different priorities, and I realised the problem was mine to fix: I needed the knowledge to engage with them on their level. That is when I found the Chartered Director programme at the Institute of Directors (IoD).

Starting the Chartered Director journey

The Chartered Director qualification is the IoD’s gold standard in director education: a rigorous programme of study, examination, and professional review in the discipline of directing a business. Returning to a classroom after years away was daunting, but I was ready to be stretched. In August 2004 I started the courses, alongside peers from very different industries who all wanted the same thing: to become better Directors and build better organisations.

By August 2005 I had completed the full suite of modules and decided to sit the Diploma in Company Direction. My first exam since 1998 took weeks of preparation, including a dedicated week off work to cram, but I passed, and the effect was immediate: better business decisions, and, at last, fluency in the language my accountants and advisers had been speaking all along.

One step further

The Diploma made me want the full qualification. Chartered Director status required a detailed portfolio of my work as a Director, and a panel interview with two Chartered Directors. The interview, in January 2006, was a searching examination of my career, my decisions, and my conduct as a Director. Four weeks later the letter arrived: I had qualified, and at the time I was the youngest Chartered Director the IoD had admitted.

What changed was practical, not ceremonial. I restructured the company, put the right people in the right roles, and built an organisation that could run without me in every room. The product pipeline grew, we became early adopters of cloud, taking major clients all-in, and I began taking on non-executive roles.

Where it led

The most valuable lesson was that the problems I thought were mine alone were shared by nearly everyone in the room. I would recommend the IoD’s Company Direction Programme to anyone joining a Board or starting a business; the tools it gives you last a working lifetime.

In 2015, the year I joined Amazon Web Services, I was elected a Fellow of the IoD. In 2023 the IoD featured my story in their Inclusion and Diversity blogiod.com“I was great at the tech but running a business was a whole different experience”: Mario Thomas CDir, Global Principal Executive Coach & Trainer, Amazon Web SerPublished 30 May 2023Open link Archived copy . In 2025 my views on AI governance were cited in the IoD’s business paper AI Governance in the Boardroomiod.comAI Governance in the BoardroomThe IoD business paper on Board-level AI governance: twelve principles for context-specific AI governance, and the expectation that a Board can pause or reverse an AI system whose behaviour proves unacceptable.Published 2025The original link is no longer available; this points to the last verified archived copy.Open archived copy , and in 2026 I spoke at the IoD’s Chartered Director Conference 2026iod.comChartered Director Conference 2026Published 11 June 2026Open link in Manchester. Twenty years on from walking into 116 Pall Mall as an overwhelmed founder, I am still drawing on what the qualification taught me.

Directorships

The executive and non-executive positions I have held.