Decide if a Career in Consulting Is Right for You

If you have a few years of experience in your industry, consulting can be a very rewarding, challenging, and lucrative career choice. But how can you tell if it is the right choice for you? What are the requirements for becoming a consultant?

Steps

  1. Be able to travel--sometimes extensively. As a consultant, you must go where the work is, and where clients pay the highest fees. So you need to be flexible in this area if you are going to succeed as a consultant.
  2. Be detail-oriented. You need to have the ability to consider (some times) large amounts of information, and based on the details of the problem at hand, come up with a viable solution. This task is far easier if you are inherently detail-oriented.
  3. Have the ability to use computers. In most cases, you present the results of your consulting work to your client in documents (e.g., MS Word documents, spreadsheets, and presentation). You must be able to create these documents with relative ease if you are going to succeed as a consultant. This, in turn, means that you must be comfortable with using computers.
  4. Be a people-loving person. Consulting is all about forming relationships with your client, and using those relationships to help your client achieve some business goal. You would not fare well as a consultant if you do not like people!
  5. Be willing to invest in your own education. Let's face it. Your clients pay you not just for your knowledge in your field. They pay you for your great consulting skills, your sincere and confident demeanor, and your ability to discover overlooked problems.
  6. Ability to stretch. As a consultant, you should be able and willing to put in long hours at work, including working on weekends if the demand arises. Deadlines are a way of life here and one must be prepared to not only meet them but also exceed them to achieve success.
  7. Know what the client wants. It's also important to learn to put oneself in the others shoes and be able to look at the bigger picture. At the end of the day, ideas are good only if they are practical and make sense to the client. They must also be communicated in a time-efficient manner. A 10-minute presentation would make a stronger impact than a 100-page report.
  8. Present yourself well. Sharp presentation skills would help you not only in clinching that dream offer but also in your subsequent work-life. This holds true since you may have very good ideas but unless you present them convincingly, it would not be easy to shoot them down. Fortunately, this is a skill which can be developed with practice.
  9. Be a good team player. Consultants almost always work in teams, and needless to say, one should be comfortable working as a team and collaborate effectively on any project, and be careful not to indulge in one-workmanship.

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