Education consultants work in the education industry to consult on a variety of topics in early childhood, primary, secondary, and higher education, or they can work in a wide range of industries to help organizations with education objectives.
Common industries that hire for education consulting jobs include publishing, education, government, sales, healthcare, nonprofit and human services, software and technology, and others. Healthcare consults work to improve the efficiencies of a medical or healthcare-related organization. Reducing costs, increasing revenue, and recommending new procedures are some of the tasks required of a healthcare consultant.
Risk management, nonprofit and human services, health insurance, medical facilities, pharmaceuticals, and wellness and fitness are some common industries that hire for this type of role. An IT consultant provides technical guidance to clients by finding and analyzing security threats, analyzing code, improving the efficiency of systems, and generally helping a business best use IT to meet its goals.
Having an expertise in software, hardware, programming, and other related technology areas can qualify you for an IT consultant job. Common industries hiring include construction and HVAC, healthcare, manufacturing, sales, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and more.
While sometimes used interchangeably with business consulting, management consulting involves training, coaching and strategy-setting at the corporate level, rather than business processes and financial outcomes. Often, consultants are self-employed contract professionals who provide services to a range of industries or organizations as needed. Many of the most prestigious consulting firms also offer flexible jobs.
A few of the larger consulting firms are:. There are also lots of smaller firms that hire consultants with specialties like operations, finance, IT, business strategy, social media, and sales and marketing.
Consulting can be a rewarding career that allows professionals to solely focus on their areas of expertise. They can also have a direct impact on the bottom line. Below are some steps to work out before becoming a consultant. And having at least a few years of experience will be necessary to show that you are an expert and can provide something of value to your client.
Companies fill consulting jobs the same way they hire regular employees—by placing a job ad. Common consulting job titles include, but are not limited to, the following:. Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date and reflects your new career as a consultant. Get in touch with people in your network who might be able to point you in the right direction. Furthermore, if you have a portfolio or a personal website that highlights your achievements, send applicable projects and outcomes. Sharpen your sales pitch and be ready to discuss how you can improve the business.
Be ready to talk numbers. Work in the field of consulting could make for a rewarding career for you, and we can help you get there. We post flexible and remote consulting jobs regularly. Take the tour and learn more about the benefits of a FlexJobs membership.
We'd love to hear your thoughts and questions. Please leave a comment below! All fields are required. Solid article! Post includes some valid points to be concentrated for getting selected for the job. I have been following your blogs from past few months and i am glad to say that, all of your posts are always meaningful. Thank you for sharing this informative stuff. I want to become more sociallable in todays market. I do have a Degree at B.
I just wanted to find how I could become a people person and succeed in life. I am an old and tired convict who as done a lot of time.
I want out of my old life. Retired social worker interested in doing some Part time work I have great communication skills and lots of experience with problem solving issues.
My career was over thirty years of helping individuals, families. Facilitated many group educational, grief, family dynamics to name just a few. Hi James — Welcome! I would suggest browsing through the job categories to see the different flexible jobs that are currently available.
Then, I would recommend using the advanced search option to target your search and narrow your results to your specific qualifications and flexibility needs. Best of luck in your search! Hi Brie. My name is James and I am interested in a great job that pays well. I have been in telecommunications and computer tech support areas. Can you help me? Hello Ann! I'm sorry that we were not available prior to your paper being due.
I hope you were able to find an interview that worked well for your project. I m doing this paper for school, I have to interview a consultant or a manger who hires a consultant, but with it being the holiday weekend everything is closed.
I m trying to find something online for a interview that I can do my paper is due this Monday July 4 any ideas what I can do. Even if I did some kind of interview online I could use it in my paper?
On the other hand, a consultant who too quickly rejects this way of describing the problem will end a potentially useful consulting process before it begins. As the two parties work together, the problem may be redefined.
Thus, a useful consulting process involves working with the problem as defined by the client in such a way that more useful definitions emerge naturally as the engagement proceeds.
Nevertheless, the process by which an accurate diagnosis is formed sometimes strains the consultant-client relationship, since managers are often fearful of uncovering difficult situations for which they might be blamed. Competent diagnosis requires more than an examination of the external environment, the technology and economics of the business, and the behavior of nonmanagerial members of the organization. The consultant must also ask why executives made certain choices that now appear to be mistakes or ignored certain factors that now seem important.
Although the need for independent diagnosis is often cited as a reason for using outsiders, drawing members of the client organization into the diagnostic process makes good sense. They, not us, must do the detail work. While this is going on, we talk with the CEO every day for an hour or two about the issues that are surfacing, and we meet with the chairman once a week. We get some sense of the skills of the key people—what they can do and how they work.
When we emerge with strategic and organizational recommendations, they are usually well accepted because they have been thoroughly tested.
Top firms, therefore, establish such mechanisms as joint consultant-client task forces to work on data analysis and other parts of the diagnostic process.
As the process continues, managers naturally begin to implement corrective action without having to wait for formal recommendations. The engagement characteristically concludes with a written report or oral presentation that summarizes what the consultant has learned and that recommends in some detail what the client should do. Firms devote a great deal of effort to designing their reports so that the information and analysis are clearly presented and the recommendations are convincingly related to the diagnosis on which they are based.
Many people would probably say that the purpose of the engagement is fulfilled when the professional presents a consistent, logical action plan of steps designed to improve the diagnosed problem. The consultant recommends, and the client decides whether and how to implement. Though it may sound like a sensible division of labor, this setup is in many ways simplistic and unsatisfactory. For example, a nationalized public utility in a developing country struggled for years to improve efficiency through tighter financial control of decentralized operations.
According to the CEO, this advice ignored big stumbling blocks—civil service regulations, employment conditions, and relations with state and local governments. This sort of thing happens more often than management consultants like to admit, and not only in developing countries. In cases like these, each side blames the other. And consultants frequently blame clients for not having enough sense to do what is obviously needed.
Unfortunately, this thinking may lead the client to look for yet another candidate to play the game with one more time. In the most successful relationships, there is not a rigid distinction between roles; formal recommendations should contain no surprises if the client helps develop them and the consultant is concerned with their implementation.
A consultant will often ask for a second engagement to help install a recommended new system. However, if the process to this point has not been collaborative, the client may reject a request to assist with implementation simply because it represents such a sudden shift in the nature of the relationship. Effective work on implementation problems requires a level of trust and cooperation that is developed gradually throughout the engagement.
In any successful engagement, the consultant continually strives to understand which actions, if recommended, are likely to be implemented and where people are prepared to do things differently. Recommendations may be confined to those steps the consultant believes will be implemented well. Some may think such sensitivity amounts to telling a client only what he wants to hear. Indeed, a frequent dilemma for experienced consultants is whether they should recommend what they know is right or what they know will be accepted.
When a client requests information, the consultant asks how it will be used and what steps have already been taken to acquire it. Then he or she, along with members of the client organization, determines which steps the company is ready to pursue and how to launch further actions. An adviser continually builds support for the implementation phase by asking questions focused on action, repeatedly discussing progress made, and including organization members on the team.
It follows that managers should be willing to experiment with new procedures during the course of an engagement—and not wait until the end of the project before beginning to implement change. When innovations prove successful, they are institutionalized more effectively than when simply recommended without some demonstration of their value.
For implementation to be truly effective, readiness and commitment to change must be developed, and client members must learn new ways of solving problems to improve organizational performance. How well these goals are achieved depends on how well both parties understand and manage the process of the entire engagement. People are much more likely to use and institutionalize innovations proved successful than recommendations merely set forth on paper.
All in all, effective implementation requires consensus, commitment, and new problem-solving techniques and management methods. To provide sound and convincing recommendations, a consultant must be persuasive and have finely tuned analytic skills. But more important is the ability to design and conduct a process for 1 building an agreement about what steps are necessary and 2 establishing the momentum to see these steps through.
An observation by one consultant summarizes this well. But that is the tip of the iceberg. What supports that is establishing enough agreement within the organization that the action makes sense—in other words, not only getting the client to move, but getting enough support so that the movement will be successful.
To do that, a consultant needs superb problem-solving techniques and the ability to persuade the client through the logic of his analysis.
In addition, enough key players must be on board, each with a stake in the solution, so that it will succeed. So the consultant needs to develop a process through which he can identify whom it is important to involve and how to interest them.
Managers should not necessarily expect their advisers to ask these questions. But they should expect that consultants will be concerned with issues of this kind during each phase of the engagement. In addition to increasing commitment through client involvement during each phase, the consultant may kindle enthusiasm with the help of an ally from the organization not necessarily the person most responsible for the engagement.
The role is similar to that of informant-collaborator in field research in cultural anthropology, and it is often most successful when not explicitly sought. If conducted skillfully, interviews to gather information can at the same time build trust and readiness to accept the need for change throughout the organization. Then members at all levels of the organization come to see the project as helpful, not as unwanted inquisition. By locating potential resistance or acceptance, the interviews help the consultant learn which corrective actions will work and almost always reveal more sound solutions and more willingness to confront difficulty than upper management had expected.
You may also be expected to train an assigned client team member to use and understand the model. This is a typical part of the overall consulting project process. This time often allows some respite from the demands of servicing clients but in some cases, maybe just as busy. You may be expected to help with business development, recruitment or knowledge building exercises. As you develop and move up the consulting hierarchy, more of your time will be dedicated to bringing in new clients or selling projects to existing ones.
As a more junior consultant, you may be expected to help out by doing some research, crunching numbers or developing pitching materials. Consultancies are always on the lookout for excellent talent, particularly at the graduate level good news for you! Consultancies are hired on the basis of their ability to problem solve and think critically. Instead, consultancies typically try to find a way to capture key learnings from consulting engagements to help them in a similar project next time.
It is common for consultancies to share and build knowledge within the firm by publishing work in an internal firm knowledge database or presenting to colleagues lessons learned from consulting engagements. You may find that yourself doing this at the end of a project! Love the sound of consulting? Updating Results. Home Advice.
What do consultants actually do? Considering a graduate career in consulting but not quite sure what it really means?
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