Career in Consulting

Consulting careers have gained lot of momentum since the information technology boom of the 1990s. The fundamental nature has also undergone a sea change since the year 2000. Any project execution or product development or for that matter any domain, such as accounting, human resources, finance or industries such as oil and gas, retail sector, etc, requires individuals specialised in a skill set not easily found among the employees of the companies. The nature of consulting is temporary and limited to project, product development and marketing.

Though consulting careers existed prior to the 1990s, the shortage of information workers during the 1990s' IT boom and flexibility in immigration policies triggered a mass exodus of qualified engineers from developing nations, mostly from South East Asia to developed nations, majorly to the United States.

The term consultant has remained same, but it is often prefixed with the demands that exist during the period. For instance, during the enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations in the mid-1990s, they were called ERP consultants or supply chain consultants.

What was called pure technical consulting or IT consulting has transformed into a business consulting practice in recent years. Over the years, with organisations adopting open source and basically the technology becoming commoditised, affordable and easy to use, technology adoption is more a coincidence.

The strategy of organisations is to leverage technology to provide high value products, services and ROI to customers. A business consultant is an individual, who has a deep understanding of technology and a broad grasp of the line of businesses.

After years of consulting, individuals could be client engagement manager, education consultants, programme managers or delivery manager in services in consulting practices of global organisations. Better still you could practice the occupation, being a practice manager, nurturing technology, business and consultants like yourself.