What Does a Consultant Do?

What Consultants Do: An Introduction

Consulting continues to be a popular field among students and experienced professionals. In reality, however, many aspiring consultants don’t fully understand what a typical workday would look like and what consultants do.

Generally, the responsibilities of a consultant fall into two main categories. The first is project work for clients. The second category is internal activities not related to client project work.

This guide provides a comprehensive look at what it takes to break into consulting, the responsibilities of a consultant, the skills it takes to do the job, and what you can expect as you do what consultants do.

Breaking Into Consulting

While a career in consulting is open to graduates from any discipline, some firms prefer a degree discipline that is analytical or numerical. With a degree in engineering, mathematics, finance, business, or economics, among others, you can break into consulting.

While a postgraduate degree isn’t necessary to become a consultant, it can certainly come in handy when doing your work. The postgraduate degree may also allow you to enter the consulting profession at a higher level instead of the junior-level analyst or associate position. 

Most firms take on new graduates at the entry-level and reinforce their expertise through training and mentorship programs. That said, many consultants come into the profession with some work experience and additional professional qualifications.

Whether you are a new graduate or a professional with some commercial experience, consulting firm entry standards and requirements are high. Competition is high, and you must stand out to break into consulting.

What Do Consultants Do?

Consultants offer professional, objective advice and expertise to client organizations to help the hiring companies improve their performance. You will use your expertise in problem-solving and various fields to provide clients with analysis, insights, and practical recommendations to create value, encourage growth, and improve the client organization’s overall performance.

Consultants work with client organizations across a wide range of industries. Clients’ needs are varied, requiring that you customize your consultation service accordingly. Consultant responsibilities on one project may involve evaluating a new market a client organization is seeking to enter. On another project, you may be required to identify ways to cut costs.

Indeed, the problems you will be tackling as a consultant are specific and clearly defined. Businesses face myriad complex issues which your services will be required to resolve. Consultants focus on many areas, including: 

• Strategy and Management
• Operations
• Marketing
• Information Technology (IT)
• Supply Chain Management 
• Human Resources Management
• Finance
• Technology Implementation

When a client requires specialized consulting services, you will work in teams of consultants specializing in different areas. This means that a team of management consultants and marketing consultants may be assigned to a client to achieve an all-around performance improvement in the different areas.

You will need to work closely with the client organization’s teams to execute your consultant responsibilities. You may have to be on site regularly and meet the client’s teams. Again, while you will use your expertise to solve a client’s problems, you may also work with the client’s teams to develop specialist skills they may be lacking, further creating value.

What Do Consultants Do: Job Description

What consultants do may vary, albeit slightly, by the area of expertise or the type of consultant you become. This is to say that the specific details in a corporate strategy consultant’s job description may differ from that of an operations management consultant. 

Regardless of the specialization or area of expertise, you can look at the work of consultants as a sequence of phases. With that in mind, the job description of a consultant falls into the following phases.

1. Problem Definition

A client organization will turn to consultants and provide details about their issues and their business. Before anything else, consultants will adequately define the problem for what it is and identify its root cause. You will need to prepare a problem statement, clearly outlining the project’s objective.

2. Objective Assessment and Analysis

As a consultant, you must understand the client organization’s business by comprehensively auditing current processes and procedures. This may involve conducting interviews, gathering data from the company’s databases, and observing tasks.

With advanced data analysis tools and employing your expertise and experience, you can gain insights from the data collected.

3. Making Strategic Recommendations

Based on the analyzed data, you will be able to develop strategic recommendations that the client organization can implement to turn things around. Reviewing industry trends and literature and leveraging your knowledge and experience will help you think creatively and critically about strategies to recommend to the client.

You will need to develop business proposals and other pitching materials to present to the client and persuade the key executives of the soundness of your recommendations.

4. Project Management

With a clear action plan for implementation, consultants take the lead or offer support in project management. You will identify what teams and other resources are needed for the implementation. Consultants may supervise the implementation of the recommended strategy to completion. However, some client organizations may choose to handle all the implementation phases independently.

Key Project-Related Consultant Responsibilities

The typical duties and responsibilities of consultants when engaged in a project for a client organization include the following.

• Collaborating with client organizations to define the problem, understand their needs, and establish a scope for the consulting project.
• Conducting research and collecting data from surveys and interviews with the client organization’s employees, management, and other stakeholders to understand the organization.
• Identifying and defining problem areas followed by hypothesizing solutions.
• Diagnosing the main cause of identified problems.
• Modeling possible solutions.
• Comprehensively assessing the strengths and cons of all possible strategies and solutions.
• Regularly communicating and liaising with the client organization for decision-making and to ensure they are up to date on the project’s progress. 
• Presenting the modeled recommendations to clients.
• Preparing presentations to help the client organization with getting other stakeholders on board.
• Developing new procedures and processes to support the implementation of recommended changes.
• Providing guidance on implementing the agreed-upon solutions.
• Managing programs and projects aimed at the implementation of the recommended solutions.
• Developing and running training programs and workshops to support the implementation of changes.
• Advising the client on what to look out for and how to proceed in solving similar issues should they come up later.

The Value of Iteration and Teamwork

What consultants do involves a lot of iteration and working together as a team. Consulting firms typically deploy teams of 4-6 consultants on a project, depending on the scope and other factors. Encouraging teamwork and iteration are some ways to ensure that you consistently deliver high-quality work for all clients.

Once you are done collecting data, analyzing and interpreting it, and making presentation slides for the client, you will share them with your team manager for review. The team manager will provide feedback, which you will incorporate into the work. Once satisfied, the team manager will then push the work higher up the hierarchy to a consulting partner.

Again, the partner will review the work, leveraging their expertise to provide incorporation feedback. Only after this will the work be presented to the client.

Similarly, the client will review your presentation and may take some time to do so with other stakeholders. Following this review, the client will provide feedback and may have some suggestions. You can discuss these suggestions before incorporating them into the work. You will then present the final work and move ahead with the next phase after getting consensus from the client organization’s executives.

Non-Project Consultant Responsibilities

Client organizations engage consultants on a project basis. A career in consulting can be demanding and very fast-paced, and you may have multiple projects simultaneously.

However, you may find yourself between projects. Here is a look at some essential functions you may engage in during these times to support internal operations.

1. Business Development

Consultants higher up in the hierarchy, such as managers and partners, take on the business development role. They leverage their relationships and networks to drum up business for the firm and find new clients.

On the other hand, junior-level consultants can help with researching potential clients and the needs of their industry. These consultants may help create presentation slides specifically designed to convince potential customers that they require consulting services and that your company is the best choice for the task. The senior-level consultants will then pitch to the potential client and guide them through the onboarding process.

2. Building the Firm’s Knowledge Base

You may acquire new knowledge and learn new concepts while consulting on a project. Documenting these findings in the firm’s knowledge base will provide other team members with a reference when working on similar projects in the future. Even if you don’t publish the findings in the firm’s knowledge base, you can prepare a presentation and share it with your colleagues.

Adding to the firm’s knowledge base helps improve all team members’ expertise. Additionally, you will save everyone time, as other consultants will not need to spend so much time carrying out research.

3. Recruitment

There is a large pool of potential hires interested in kickstarting or advancing their consulting career. Consulting firms are always on the lookout for new talent with exceptional potential. 

You can help your firm in its recruitment efforts in various ways. In addition to preparing and making recruiting presentations at top target schools, you can also be involved in first-round interviews. 

Also, share insights and give an insider’s look into what life at your firm will look like for the successful candidates who will no doubt want to know about the culture at your firm. As you climb higher in the corporate ladder, you may also train newly hired team members and those who are junior in rank.

4. Event Organization

Consultancies organize and hold multiple events throughout each year. In addition to the recruiter Q&As already highlighted, your firm may have office parties, team-building activities, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) events such as charities. 

Planning these events to perfection takes time and effort. When not actively involved in direct service delivery to clients, you may be assigned or can volunteer to contribute towards organizing such events.

What to Expect: The Life of a Consultant 

The workload for consultants can get quite intense, especially when you are working on a project. Clients will have high expectations, and you must commit to delivering high-quality results on time. 

How much time you will need to put in will depend on the type of project and the client. Some projects may take as little as three months, while others may take much longer. The intensity and pace may also vary by project. For instance, working with government agencies tends to be generally slower-paced and less intense.

Consulting firms work with clients across various industries, spread out across different locations within and outside the country. Frequent traveling may, therefore, be a regular part of your work. With local clients, you will be working from your home office.

As a consultant, you will get to work with high-profile clients and interact with other high-achievers from various backgrounds. You will have plenty of opportunities to network. Consultants who network with others get mentorship opportunities and many chances to interact with and learn more from their peers. Similarly, you can create connections to help you advance your career, even when the time comes that you decide to leave your firm or even the consulting profession.

Top Skills for Management Consultants

The best-performing management consultants have cultivated and mastered a variety of skills. With these core skills, you can be a better consultant, equipped to create more value for your clients.  

Each skill is just as important as the next one, and you should try to cultivate as many of these skills as possible. A highlight of the top 10 of these essential skills is as follows.

1. Research Skills

Understanding a company’s problems and challenges is the first step in performing your job as a consultant. You will need to do some investigative work which requires excellent research skills. You may want to research the company’s database for various information sources such as historical data, sales information, and organizational charts.

Similarly, you will need to research what the client’s competitors and other players in the same industry are doing to tackle similar challenges and stay ahead. This type of research can provide some inspiration on the strategies to implement.

2. Analytical Skills

Management consulting work is data-driven. You will need top-notch analytical skills to transform various types and amounts of data into valuable and actionable insights that businesses can use to improve their processes and overall performance. 

Consultants review data to understand the current situation, such as the time it takes to complete a specific task. The consultant will then make an informed prediction of how this data may change after implementing specific process changes.

3. Critical Thinking 

Critical thinking positions you to process information and make an informed judgment. As a management consultant, you must first understand the goals and objectives of the client company. You will then need to think critically about the data you get from task observations, interviews with employees, and following data analysis. After reviewing the company’s processes, any changes you recommend must align with these strategic goals and support its vision.

4. Problem-Solving

Solving problems is ultimately why companies hire consultants. All the research and analysis of how a company currently operates should help you come up with solutions to current issues. As a consultant, you must also envision the risk of other problems in the future and develop strategies to help the company steer clear of them.

Similarly, problems and challenges may come up in the course of your consulting project. As an effective problem solver, you can ensure you remain on task by handling each hurdle most efficiently.

5. Teamwork and Collaboration

As a consultant, you will be collaborating not only with your team members but also with the client company’s teams. You may find yourself working with staff members at all levels and must be thoroughly equipped for it. 

With junior-level staff, this may mean collaborating with them and providing a supervisory role to ensure task completion. You will require next-level communication skills to help high-level management executives understand your proposed strategies better.

While working as part of a team, you must be open-minded and understand your role and limits. You must remember that you have a shared goal with the rest of the team to develop and implement what is best for the company.

6. Organization and Time Management

Clients will require deliverables within specific deadlines. As a consultant, you need excellent time management skills to ensure you deliver within these deadlines. 

Stay organized when assigning resources and teams to different tasks to stay within your estimated timelines. Also, observe brevity while being thorough when conducting meetings with the client so they can get on with their day without disruption.

The key to being organized lies in defining the project. What is the scope of the project? What and who do you need during each phase of the project?

7. Flexibility

Clients changing goals isn’t uncommon in management consulting. A change in goals may also translate to a change in the scope of your consulting project and the introduction of new challenges. Through it all, you must be highly flexible while remaining organized. You must be able to adapt to the changes and deliver accordingly.

8. Business Knowledge and Commercial Awareness

Business knowledge is multi-faceted and includes, among other things, a solid understanding of internal organizational hierarchies and standards and external market influences. This knowledge base and overall commercial awareness will help you analyze data better and ensure you propose practical solutions that comply with industry standards and regulations.

9. Communication Skills

Working as a consultant will involve engaging in a lot of oral and written communication with clients before, during, and even after completing the projects. Whether you are asking meaningful questions before project commencement or presenting your analysis, your communication skills can have a significant impact. 

How well you communicate can inspire confidence in your client. You should also be able to break down all those complex and technical ideas you would like to recommend, so the client understands.

A communication skill that is crucial for consultants is listening. Let the client do the talking and actively participate by asking the right questions.

10. Project Management

Many companies hire consultants not only to develop solutions but also to oversee their implementation. Your project management skills will significantly influence whether or not you can deliver the project on schedule and on budget. These skills include defining project scope and creating schedules, assigning teams and allocating resources, defining success indicators, and scheduling meetings with various parties.

More Skills

In addition to the highlighted consultant skills, you will also need to demonstrate the following.

• Attention to detail
• Ability to focus and work under pressure
• Creativity and innovation
• Enthusiasm and passion
• Progressive leadership
• Quick decision-making

How to Improve Your Consultant Skills

Mastering the all-around skills of a consultant may take time. It is, however, never too soon after becoming a consultant or too late to work on these skills.

Working on your areas of weakness is well worth the time, effort, and other resources you put towards it. Improving your skills will help you do better for clients, position you for better opportunities and career progression and enhance your job satisfaction. 

To get started, identify the specific areas where you could use some help. Here is a look at several ways to help you improve your knowledge and skills as a consultant.

1. Do More

Identify what tasks and projects give you the exposure to better specific skills and take these on. You may also want to work with diverse clients. This may require speaking to a principal or director, so you are assigned to such work.

Doing the same work and working with the same type of clients, especially where you can showcase your greatest strengths, can easily result in complacency. On the other hand, every new experience and challenging yourself will open you up to opportunities to improve your skill set and expand your knowledge base.

2. Learn From the Best

Find seasoned consultants within and outside your firm who demonstrate the consultant skills you want to improve. Many would be happy to offer mentorship and share how they acquired those skills and what they do to improve their knowledge base. 

Similarly, look out for resources that these seasoned consultants share. This may include books, podcasts, and published scholarly articles. Diligently studying these resources is just as good as any one-on-one interaction.

3. Take a Course

There is a wide range of courses, some industry-specific and others not, that cover the skills you need to master as a consultant. You can get certified after completing some courses, which is always a plus and well worth the investment.

Again, many management consultant firms have training and professional development programs you can take on to improve specific skills. The best part is that these programs are free and fully sponsored by the firm.

Value for Clients: The Benefits of What Consultants Do

As a consultant, you will be working closely with clients to identify challenges and find practical solutions to these problems. Whatever the scale of operation and industry in which the business operates, consultants create value for the hiring company in various ways.

1. Unparalleled Expertise

Your training equips you with the knowledge and expert skills for the job. Additionally, consultants interact and work with many clients. This provides exposure to industry trends and new processes and technologies that are crucial when developing practical solutions for businesses. Actually, hiring consultants provides clients with an opportunity to leverage new skills.

In contrast, a hiring company’s internal team’s skills and understanding of what it takes to solve the business’ challenges and improve performance may be limited. You will be filling this skills gap with your consulting services.

2. Objectivity

Internal teams may be subjective when assessing a company’s processes and performance. This is especially true if the same teams were responsible for developing these processes and performance drivers. Again, the internal teams may be so used to looking at and doing things a certain way and would rather maintain the status quo and traditions.

On the other hand, consultants provide an objective outsider perspective. With no biases and the client’s best interests in mind, you can objectively assess a company’s current state, its challenges, and the best solutions for these challenges.

3. Time Savings

As a consultant, your expansive knowledge base, skill set, and industry experience equip you to solve problems fast. After analyzing the company’s data and processes, you can quickly identify inefficiencies and problem areas. 

A company’s internal teams may require a lot more time to identify these inefficiencies and even longer to come up with practical solutions. This is time that the employees would otherwise utilize to perform other duties.

4. Cost Savings

Consultants help clients to identify areas where they are overspending and map out how to cut costs. The cost savings can be huge and significantly impact the company’s bottom line.

Similarly, clients only hire and pay for the services of consultants as and when needed. Hiring a full-time salaried employee with the expertise to do what consultants do may prove too expensive for a business, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. While the services of consultants are costly, companies recognize the cost-saving potential of this hire arrangement.

5. High-Level Customization

Expert consultants don’t offer one-size-fits-all solutions to clients. You will tailor your advice to the specific needs of a business after learning the client’s business, challenges, and goals. Generic and broad advice will certainly not be as effective as the customized approaches recommended by a consultant.

6. Improved Efficiency

Any inefficiencies in a company’s processes or structure can be very costly and will be in the way of achieving its goals. As a consultant, you will assess the current status of the business and identify opportunities to improve efficiency. In addition to guidance on these areas, you will also provide implementation support, so the hiring company can start operating at optimal efficiency as soon as possible.

7. Accomplishing Short-Term Goals

Consultants provide the expertise required for short-term goal setting and achievement. Clients will look to you to develop the best strategies to achieve these short-term goals and ensure they align with the long-term goals in the bigger picture. You can provide the guidance a company needs when it requires an urgent directional change or consultation on a specific project.

8. Time to Plan

Hurried implementation can negatively impact the success of even the best of strategies. As a consultant, you will provide the client with actionable insights and lay out a map for proper implementation, complete with timelines. You will inform the client how important it is to be systematic in the implantation.

Get Started: Breaking into Consulting

Do you have what it takes to thrive as a consultant? Also, with a clear understanding of consultant duties, work schedule, and other things you can expect as a consultant, is consulting right for you? This is a critical question you must answer before taking any step toward getting into the profession and joining almost half a million consultants currently employed in the United States alone.

If yes, follow these steps to help you break into consulting.

• Identify your areas of interest and what aligns with your qualifications and experience when applying for consultant jobs.
• Polish your application and submit it within the deadline.
• Prepare for the interview, both behavioral and case interviews.
• Network and gain further insights on a career in consulting.

Thriving As a Consultant

This article has covered what consultants do and an overview of what to expect from your work life. With this awareness and mental preparedness, even before you start on this career path, will greatly impact your success.

It is also crucial to actively cultivate the skills outlined and more. Not only will a demonstration of these skills help you get hired, but they will also be essential in your day-to-day work and an important tool in thriving and advancing your career.