UK IT consultants enjoy kudos all over the world and are currently being hired in their droves in places like California. Online business marketplace PeoplePerHour.com reported a 275% increase in the number of US firms hiring UK IT consultants over the last year.
It’s a high-octane career, but exactly what do consultants do for their £60k+ salaries?
Pre-sales consultant
For this role you need to be a techie with a little bit of sales person in your soul. You are part of a sales effort and ensure customers understand the software or services, making it more likely they’ll buy. The pre-sales consultant conducts software demos or explains the project flows in sales presentations. Organisations also use their pre-sales folk to teach classes and even work on post-sales engagements that bring in more revenue.
IT Consultant
This job will appeal to those at the geeky end of the IT spectrum: he or she needs to know all about platform integration, resource and peripheral specifications for any anticipated solution. Once all that knowledge has been tucked securely under the belt, they make the call on whether existing infrastructure is suitable. If it’s not, the next step is to provide guidance on necessary changes.
The technical consultant can be found working within a corporate enterprise or working for an IT product vendor. In both cases strong communication and presentation skills are a must for this role, plus deep tech knowledge.
Management consultant
IT management consultants are primarily concerned with IT in the context of strategy, structure, management and operations of an organisation. Typical remit includes identifying options, making recommendations, providing additional resources and possibly implementing solutions.
You’ll likely work with one of the Big Four - PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche, Ernst & Young and KPMG. The upside is kudos, big salary, perks and the opportunity to travel. However, you’ll also be a slave to the project and camp out on the client site until the work is delivered to the client’s satisfaction. Politics within management consultancies are notoriously ferocious, too.
Top notch consultant
Whichever branch of IT consultancy you go into, it’s a bit like being a fund manager: the good ones are more respected than the company they work for. So, you need to cultivate your own brand, as well as your company’s. That’s the route to going independent and making even more money.
Speaking at conferences is the fast track getting a name as a consultant.
Search and apply for Consultants, Pre-sales Consultants and Management Consultants
