The Consulting Life

There are just as many myths about consulting as there are innumerous intriguing facts. One gets interesting view points when you talk to people connected to consulting in different ways: young aspirants, clients, consulting firms, seasoned consultants. This article attempts to look at consulting from eyes of various stakeholders and in the process understand this black hole a bit better.

Young Aspirant:

• Consulting is about a glamorous role and a glamorous lifestyle
• Consulting is about understanding management concepts and rocket science
  frameworks
• Consulting is about working late nights and brain storming sessions
• Consulting is about talking a lot of jargon and using terminologies that makes
  people sit up and notice
• Consulting is about having knowledge far greater than clients
• Consulting is about travel and meeting high profile business people.
• Consulting is about high salary packages and an early retirement
  

Experienced Consultant:

• As much as it’s about being a business generalist, you need deep specialism in some business aspect
• Consulting is not about finance, technology, human resource etc. Its about business solutions, a particular function may be the trigger point of a problem. The solution often lies across functions and hence very strong business acumen is a perquisite.
• Jargons and frameworks are only for internal use. Clients don’t understand them nor do they want to go through a tutorial from the consultant to understand them.
• Top of the mind or even research based advice is not enough…you need to be
  willing to dirty your hands and show them just how it’s done. Implementation is just as important as strategizing.
• Traveling is not always glamorous. It has its advantages and high but trust me it can get tiring physically and emotionally
• No consulting is not just late nights…consultants have a life too
  

Client:

• Being so close to the drama they sometimes need an outsider to look at things from a distance
• Consultants have often gone through similar situations in different client situations and hence bring in value add of having seen and experienced similar situations before
• Consultants are in business of doing constant research, creating point of views around some of these issues, testing them and further implementing them.
• Some matters just require an independent view
• They need deep content specialists who have spent their careers dealing with certain content areas in resolving some matters

Consulting Firms:

• People with extremely high teaming abilities
• Strong business acumen and business sense
• Content specialism is some area or strong content academic background in case of a fresher
• Match with basic skill sets required in consulting: Project Management, Business Development, People Management, Client Management and Content Management
• People with high level of energy and adaptability to different situations
• Comfort with ambiguity

Largely at entry and junior level firms look for folks who are bright and have skill set to team and learn quickly. At middle and senior level, entry level requirements become base requirement and they look more for value add around one or more of base consulting pillars: Client, Project, People and Business Management.

Fact that solving business problems requires various view points of business consulting firms often hire people with various skill sets and backgrounds. Successful firms are known to hire broader skill sets then just their functional domain area. Unfortunately many of the consultants forget that the biggest contribution they bring to the firm is their background and base knowledge. Instead many of them start to unlearn their backgrounds and wind themselves into frameworks created by firm. Not realizing that’s something the firm always had.

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