Job Responsibilities
Leading and delivering against management consulting engagements
for clients in a number opf induastry sectors including
Financial services and Consumer Retail.
Developing consulting proposals. The nature of these engagements
vary a great deal from strategic disgnostics of an organisation
to developing a business case for the year end budgeting
purposes. What they all have in common is the fact that the
focus is IT-enabled solutions e.g. CRM or outcourcing.
It requires a diverse set of skills from fanancial analysis of
client organisations to understanding the underlying
technologies (not in detail) to developing roaqdmaps to enable
clients to progress in achieving their business objectives.
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Job Requirements
There is a lot of focus on industry experience as well as
general consulting skills such as being able to present well in
front of clients and facilitate workshops and generally manage
difficult people. In addition some roles require analytical
skills depending on the area you focus on. For example
developing business cases requires a lot of financial and
numerate skills whereas change management consultant (not what I
do) need more soft skills.
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Uppers
I like the combination of client facing engagement where you try to discober how
a client's business works, what their issues are and how to overcome them through
solutions that have a good chance of success and address most of the
stakeholders' needs (you can't satisfy everyone all the time).
In addition I like the analytical aspects of some of the engagements and using
unusual approaches such as business dynamics principles, risk analysis and
decision optimisation.
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Downers
There are very few occasions where the management in your own
consulting organisation understand what you do on a day to day
basis and even fewer occasions when they show any kind of
appreciation. Generally this aspect of management is pretty much
missing completely which is sureprising for a group of peopple
who claim to be management consultants!
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Lifestyle
Depending on your client's location you may have to travel a lot. Generally if
you stick to financial services (particlarly banking) you will tend to work in
cosmopolitan areas, in my case London, UK. Whereas a number of my colleagues who
have focussed on public sector or manufactuiring tend to do more travel which may
be what you want oif you are yound and like in staying in hotels and living off
expenses.
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Compensation
EDS is pretty poor and they will try to pay you as little as
possible. Hence in 2004 there was a huge mass-exodus when the
market picked up. Now they are having to recruit at rates of
around 20% above what they were paying their best people and pay
recruitment agency fees on top of that: how stupid is that? But
not maing any single person responsible for these losses means
no one cares (remember as a rule the best people leave first
because they can!).
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Advice to Jobseekers
Management Cosulting is a very challenging area which will
stratch your abilities to the limit if you work for a top firm.
If you are interested in developing as an individual not just in
terms of technical skills but in terms of developing a strong
and hopefully interesting character then go for it.
The other attraction is the fact that client work is temporary
and once it is finished you can move to another client with a
different issue, a different culture and environment and it does
pretty much feel like a new job, which may be exciting for some
people including me.
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