I never understood what consultants do? Most of the grinders or ones that do all the dirty work are kids fresh out of school. What do they know about giving advice to in house management who might have 30+ years of experience in their industry?
This is something I always was confused about. Now that I'm older, what experience is a kid who is 20-21 fresh out of college who most likely never held a professional job in their life have to offer? Are they just support for the seniors to do all the leg work, paperwork, presentation prep?
It completely depends on what type of consulting you’re doing i.e. technology consulting vs management consulting.
One thing to note about consulting firms is there is a lot of knowledge within the ranks because people have worked across various industries and seen a lot of things and can channel that to help their clients solve problems. For example if you’re in the pharma industry you’ve probably seen a similar problem across all your clients and you can recommend what you’ve seen work effectively vs ineffectively. Or for example a client could be lacking a capability you’ve seen somewhere else and you can speak to how in the industry if they add that capability they’ll produce more, make more $ or whatever.
Also sometimes you’re right the clients know what’s up but within their organization they know if a third party makes the same recommendation it’ll be better received.
With that being said, I’m an analytics consultant and my work/recommendations go up to the c suite and I’d say we have a tangible impact because we help with their cloud strategy and things of that nature.
