| Topic Name: |
New Hire - Consultant |
| Message Name: |
Same career |
| Date Posted: |
01/06/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
Hi everyone. I am about to embark on a new career at Accenture in the Federal Government consulting department at the Reston office. I just got an decent offer today and accepted the position. I have not had any consulting experience but I have been working in the IT field for 4 years as a software developer.
I am excited about starting my career and would like to have some advice on how to make the most of the consultant position.
Thanks
|
| Message: |
You're not making a career change. Your career is still IT development and support. You've only made a job change (within your career) from one IT job to another.
"Consulting" has different meanings depending on the field. We don't do consulting the way, say a former government official or political science professor might become a politcal consultant. We don't do management consulting the way someone at McKinsey or the management consulting arm of Deloitte might do. Basically, the consulting here means working on an outside team at a client doing similar work to the client's employees, but only on a temporary basis. Maybe the people on the Accenture team have a particular technology skill or experience that the client happens to be lacking at the time, or maybe the client only needs the skills for the short-term (say 6 - 18 months).
Also, the client might be in a different city than you are, so you will travel to the client's city to do the work. You might put in 42 or 43 hours M-Th, fly home late Thu night, then work a half day either from home or from the local ACN office. So that's another way "consulting" is different.
In addition, when you work for the IT department as an employee, you usually get some training or tuition reimbursement for classes. As an ACN consultant there is no training and evening and weekend classes (at your own expense) are impractical, due to the travel and long hours. So you pretty much have to either have the skills already developed or learn them on the job from the client's IT staff.
But the day-to-day tasks, themselves, are no different than the work you'd do as an employee of the client, other than the fact that there is a certain jargon everyone at ACN is expected to use and we all follow the same ways and procedures to do our work. This makes it easier to ramp up, since it's all pretty much spelled out and follow-the-dots.
But the technical work you did before will be pretty much the same as the work you did before. That's why they hired you. They needed someone to do whatever it you've been doing before.
Good luck on your new job and your time at Accenture.
|
|
