Summa

Instead of giving the obligatory dictionary definition, I’ll just say it like this: a consultant is someone with some wisdom (hopefully), that is asked for advice and guidance. More specifically, companies employ IT consultants to help them solve their business problems with technology. Some consultants are specialists; they have a narrow field of expertise, and are brought in to work with one specific technology. Other consultants (Summa consultants, for example) tend to be generalists; they’ve worked on many different problems at many different companies, using varying technologies as needs dictate.

One of the great things about being a consultant (and especially a generalist consultant) is being able to work on a large number of different projects in different companies. Each project may use a different technology, or apply a technology in different ways. Each project has its own series of hurdles to overcome, and its own collection of mistakes waiting to be made. Each project has different people to work with, and teaches new lessons about human interactions and team dynamics. And so, each project makes the consultant a little bit wiser by the end. Then the consultant takes this wisdom onto the next project. This happens over and over again, and in this way a consultant’s skill set organically grows over time. For someone is interested in IT, who loves working with people and solving problems with technology, it doesn’t get much better than this. So why isn’t everybody a consultant?

Consulting isn’t for everyone. It takes a certain type of person to do this well, and unfortunately it’s not always the type of person associated with IT. A consultant must always be active and engaged, energetic, and interested in the work and in the team. A consultant can’t hunker down in his cube and work anonymously. Most often, a consultant is always out there, visible and vocal in meetings, and giving advice (he is a “consult”-ant after all). It’s a high-visibility position. A consultant must be ready to accept responsibility and take the blame for his mistakes (and that blame will come, quite often to a consultant faster than it would come to a full-time employee). You have to have a thick skin. Consulting can be stressful.

I’ve found that consultants often feed off of this stress, rather than find it unpleasant. To coin a phrase, “there is no failure, only feedback.” Deadlines and criticism can create a sense of urgency in a project that can be fun (weird as that sounds), or at least makes it a job worth caring about. Consulting forces you to be sharp, and that’s always a good thing.

Looking at the last couple of paragraphs I just wrote, I make it sound like consulting takes place in this non-stop boiler-room type of atmosphere 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. It really doesn’t. Most of the time, things are perfectly calm. Except when they aren’t. If you feel like you’re growing stale at a full-time job, becoming expert in one weird technology that is already obsolete, you might want to give consulting a look. How do you think so many of us got here in the first place?