Become a Time Management Consultant
Learning to teach people how to work and manage efficiently can improve managers and employees job prospects, their pay and their company's success. If managers and employees lack good time management skills, some businesses hire time management consultants (also called productivity consultants) to offer productivity strategies. These consultants frequently offer other business strategy services, in order to increase their relevance in the job market. Unlike many other careers, there is more than one established training path required to begin work in this field. However, you should develop management categories and skills while taking advantage of training and work experience in a business, engineering field or educational environment.
Steps
- Earn a bachelor's degree that can lead into this field. Since time consultants are generally hired by larger organizations, they will be heavily vetted based initially on education and then on experience, a track record of excellence. The type of undergraduate degree you choose can greatly enhance your future career in productivity consulting in several fields:
- For educational consulting, consider a degree in childhood development, counseling, occupational therapy or education. You can be hired to help teachers to engage students, and to help children to gain learning skills, making them more productive.
- For business consulting, consider a degree in business administration, occupational therapy or psychology, with a minor in a business field.
- For manufacturing and building, choose an engineering field, if you are able in math and analytical problem solving skills. Also, be involved in product development, construction architecture, design engineering, industrial engineering, technology, production, processing, technical writing, publishing,...
- Seek a master's of business administration (an MBA) degree, if you want to go into business time management consulting. Often productivity consultants hold an MBA. With this degree, you can be expected to understand the business environment and how people interact in that setting.
- For consulting in the academic setting, you can pursue a master's degree in student counseling or educational psychology. In some programs, you can create a master's thesis with your own focus. Choose a degree that stresses student centered productivity and types of learning skills, to become an expert in an institutional setting.
- Seek a job in a university, community college or high school counseling setting. If you want to follow an educational path, you should apply for jobs working directly with students. Give preference to jobs where you work with people's study habits, such as designing study schedule materials for a person's individual needs.
- Be trained and paid as a Graduate student "Time Management and Study Strategies Consultant" at the campus student center (SC), library resource center (LRC) or academic resource center (ARC), etc. Free training sources: you will be selected and trained as a qualified graduate student, in diverse disciplines (primarily in the fields of education, child development, and occupational therapy) and varied backgrounds (international students, speaking English as a second language, first-generation college students, and students who may themselves have learning or attentional disabilities). The team of TM&SS graduate consultants form a dedicated, cohesive, and diverse corps.
- Gain successful work experience. A productivity consultant's resume should be able to show that using your highly efficient work style has led to success. Gather a list of successes, whether they are your clients increases in sales, their promotions or gaining new clients.
- Seek work experience where you can make presentations regularly to colleagues and managers. The confidence gained from speaking in a group setting will be invaluable later on.
- Seek specialized time management training and seminars: Search online for "Becoming a Business Consultant" and "Getting Paid to Give Business Advice", and such action oriented information. Enroll in classes taught by working consultants, to get an idea of how their sessions are conducted and what they offer. Try a handful of these sessions in different professional settings. They may hire and train you for free, because you fit their own needs and plans.
- Practice public speaking. Many time management consultants become keynote speakers, inspirational trainers, and group training session leaders. If you do not have speaking experience already, sign up for a local Toastmasters Club and perform some long presentations.
- Develop your own time management strategies. You should come up with an original plan and your presentation that can be implemented in a wide variety of business settings. Most time management consultants have separate strategies to present to individuals from those that are presented for company-specific needs.
- Consider starting a business consulting firm. It might will be necessary to begin to work in a part-time capacity as a time management consultant in conjunction with other services: accounting, engineering management, related employment agency, efficient temporaries, efficient debt collections,...
- File business structure documents with your Secretary of State and County Clerk. You may choose to be a sole proprietor or form a partnership or corporation.
- File a fictitious name certificate or "doing business as" (DBA) form. You should name your business in a way that helps people identify what you offer. For example, "[Inspired] Productivity Services," "[Your-brand] Efficiency Experts, Inc," or something similar.
- Apply for a business license in your state. In most locales, you are required to become a licensed business consultant in order to make money in your business.
- Create marketing materials. You will need a website, business cards, letterhead and presentation aids. Make sure you use a logo and branding that is constant throughout these materials. Offer training such as for:
- "Team Efficiency - Group Training" --- "Build Team Enthusiasm by Focusing - Removing Blocks of Productivity"
- "Get Sustainable Results - With Your Philosophy" --- "Control Your Email - Using Automated Systems" --- "Learn from Background Chatter or Noise - Increase Creativity and Productivity"
- "Learn Productivity Tricks - Form Success Habits" --- "Responsible Emotions Management - Keeping Cool Under Stress"
- "Identify Your Goals - Find Inspiration and Pursue Them" --- "Personal Productivity - Executive Training"
- Get your name out in the business world. Try a number of the following options to gain credibility for your business. Be a: Certified Professional Organizer® and become active in the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) and local area NAPO, as well as in the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).
- Write a catchy book. Create an ebook or a paperback business book that names some strategies for particular industries, for instance. You can sell this book or give it to potential clients to convince them of your value to an organization.
- Start a productivity blog. Regular blogging allows you to show that you are an expert. Offer small snippets of valuable information in your posts, and professionals and businesses may come to you.
- Earn a teaching fellowship while finishing your master's degree.
Be an instructor at a local business school. This credential will prove that you can teach adults. This may be something you can do while you offer consulting services. - Speak at conventions. Market yourself to business conventions throughout your area or the country. As a time management consultant, your skills can apply to almost any industry, so you can develop a large market. You may want to study specific industries in order to offer industry-specific solutions.
- Start a professional time management organization or group. Create a website or a meeting for your industry. Since the productivity industry remains open and unregulated, you may establish yourself as a leader in the industry.
- Write expert articles for journals, magazines and websites. Many professions could use time management advice, so make a press kit and offer your services to radio talk shows, local news stations and print or online media.
- Improve and perfect your productivity strategies. Since the modern working environment is always changing, you should change with it. For example, one-third of American workers are now working from home, and they need advice that works for the relaxed, distracting home business setting.
- Learn to teach how to:
- Net anything and everything -- Your reasonable attention, showing necessary concern
- Define actionable items -- Your next steps, advancing successful outcomes
- Create an environment that supports productivity -- Delegate duties and avoid distractions
- Protect your time -- Set limits/boundaries (insulating, isolating) from distractions
- Organize information -- Your most streamlined path, managing vital categories
- Organize work space flow -- Routing throughput, expediting, avoid back-/cross-tracking
- Set priorities -- Reduce time spent on non-priority tasks and carry out prioritized listing as an "action plan",
- (A) Urgent and important tasks, (B) Important tasks that are not urgent, (C) Tasks that are neither urgent nor important.
- Consider forcing all B priority tasks either "To do: A" or "Get around to: C" priority.
- (A) Urgent and important tasks, (B) Important tasks that are not urgent, (C) Tasks that are neither urgent nor important.
- Set short, medium and long-term goals -- Work in priority order, goal focused, purposeful ("Let gravity help set some goals" - Tasks that attract/need actions)
- Get on task -- Set cell phone To-do list, multiple calendar alarms as reminders (Sometimes a list of priority tasks, jobs or sales appointments is kept by a production coordinator, staff member, receptionist or clerk.)
- Manage/Coordinate production jobs/projects -- Schedule on spreadsheet; job or project board
- Look ahead and predict events -- Using appropriate, frequent reviews
- Keep track of the big picture items -- Managing company policy in smaller areas
- Make trusted policy choices -- Ensuring what you "can do, in any given moment"
- Expect "unexpected" events -- Manage emergency planning and preparedness
- Motivate applying productivity policy -- Get decisions, check back and "celebrate examples!"
- Learn academic and related topics that education, school and college student time management may involve, including:
- Time Management (Game Plan)
- Procrastination -- set prompts, cell, or smart phone calendar
- Organizing, Categorizing (Play Book),
- Prioritizing -- Live Urgently -- Worst First ("get it done"), Good Later ("nice to know")
- Reading Techniques (scan overview, read with objectives, rescan on details, recite)
- Test-Preparation and Test-Taking Strategies
- Motivation (stop making outs, make runs)
- Note-Taking -- for review
- Study Strategies
- Self-Awareness of Strengths and Weaknesses
- Help-Seeking (Personal Training/Coaching)
- Using Collaborative Resources (Study "huddle")
- Executive Functions -- processes to connect experience with present action
- Following up consulting (Coaches Making Halftime Adjustments),
- Apply accountability partners (Cheerleaders for continuing application)
- Time Management (Game Plan)
Tips
- Find or create tests for prospects for your services, to pretest employees, test buying in and client/company follow-through (retesting) such as:
- "Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Neutral / Agree / Strongly Agree"
- Forced choice with only two choices can be worded several ways on very similar issues, to test sincerity of answers and understanding of questions...
- Use the test results! Have several ongoing assessment efforts to motivate clients.
- Test to discover "What worked or didn't work?"
- Large or Small Client:
- Serving "large budget" productivity clients may be demanding (risky if results are not seen as excellent) but lucrative, if they love your results. They may try-out an "upcoming trainer/motivator" on some limited basis, but such opportunities may be for discriminating clients so that: "good enough is not good enough." (Realize that travel and lodging can be very expensive and necessary just to get a chance to make a bid/offer away from your home area.)
- Serving "low budget" clients, smaller/limited productivity projects (businesses and individuals), may provide a beginning, a living and valuable experience, while starting up and breaking into the efficiency marketplace to try to attain progressively larger business opportunities/and build credibility, as you get some breakthrough clientele.
Warnings
- As a consultant, you may be often looked upon as an outsider, an unwelcome intruder to the departmental pecking order at your client company. Perhaps you were brought in by new management who are not trusted.
- Expect resistance and accept it, embrace it, meekly and on top of it, affectionately (not as an enemy, or as a "private joke", go public with building trust between departments, and agencies)!
- A sales maxim says: 20% of sales makers -- do 80% of the sales and earn 80% of sales commissions -- then the other 80% of sales persons only earn 20% on the commissions...
- There are other "80/20 claims" for work, sales, design, planning, etc. such as:
(1) 80% of the productivity may be achieved by doing 20% of the possible tasks/jobs;
(2) the remaining 20% of productivity may be achieved by doing the other 80% of tasks/jobs; - Then this may indicate that certain "productivity opportunities" should be "assigned high priority" for your earnings purposes such as top dollar sales (imagine celebrity and other moneyed clients, etc.).
Things You'll Need
- Bachelor's degree, focused toward productivity:
- MBA (concentrate on time management and productivity)
- Master of Education (for training teachers and students)
- Master of Engineering (perfecting efficiency strategies)
- Successful work experience
- Public speaking skills
- Time management strategies
- Business filings
- Marketing materials
- Prospect-Test, Pretest, Test, Retest (ongoing assessments)
- Brand and logo, with a motto
- Blog, sincere but invitational level
- Book outlining efficiency
- Expert advice articles
- Testimonials, true stories
- Teaching position
- Speaking engagements
- Consulting license if required
- Join professional associations
