In sport it may be the number of points a team needs to clinch a championship – or avoid relegation. There’s also a rock band called the Magic Numbers. In internal communication, there’s a new number, or at least a new sense of scale. But no magic was involved.

Just before we all broke up for the festive season to spend more time with our families, tablets and train sets (we’re not judging...) IoIC and theblueballroom published a piece of robust research to answer the question: how many people work in IC in the UK? Making a judicious use of independent data sources about business sectors, sizes and numbers, a deftly-executed dive into LinkedIn profiles and a measured use of extrapolation, our Size of Sector researchers identified over 45,000 people working in IC in Britain. These are both full- and part-time roles, recognising that many practitioners have a split role, combining IC with other responsibilities.

The research focused on in-house roles across public and private sectors and all economic spheres. No surprise that those who work in blue-chip household-name organisations were much easier to find and count than the 0.24% of a person looking after IC in the great rump of smaller enterprises across Britain’s economic base. That’s why we’ve used the cautious phrase ‘over 45,000’.

If not magic, the number is certainly appreciable. It’s smaller than the UK’s 140,000-strong HR community (source: CIPD) or its 76,000 qualified accountants (source: Randstad), or its 103,000 dental practitioners (source: General Dental Council). But it isn’t so completely out-of-scale with those other professions as to be unworthy of comparison. It broadly equates to the populations of prominent towns like Banbury, Llanelli or Kilmarnock. And if the entire IC community gathered at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium it would just about fill it. And what a show that would be.

So we can now put a figure on the size of the IC sector. So what? The answer is, so that’s how many IC people are out there influencing organisational success for better or for worse. And so bosses should care a lot about the quality of IC being delivered or facilitated by these 45,000 practitioners. And employers should know what they’re getting when they take on an IC person and what they can expect in terms of skills and know-how. There’s plenty of room for creativity but equally IC is a technical discipline. Mastery means grasping the suite of techniques to deal with different scenarios. It also means knowing which of those techniques will work in which cultures. In a word, it’s a profession. So professional development (PD) is hugely important.

IoIC became an institute five years ago to put PD at the heart of IC, because that’s the only way to accelerate professionalisation across the sector. If IC contributes to organisational success then the quality of what over 45,000 IC practitioners do is far too important to leave to chance. No one sits expectantly in an unqualified dentist’s chair thinking ‘No pain, no gain!’ Nor should those who hire IC practitioners. Bosses have a responsibility to hire IC people with the right capabilities. At IoIC it’s part of our mission to set minimum standards of practice and to influence and equip practitioners to attain them. Now we have a robust index of the size of the sector, our mission has just got bigger.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of IoIC