WHAT SORT OF PEOPLE BECOME CONSULTANTS?


Many people become consultants, having previously worked in specialist line positions. Indeed, management consultancies often draw their recruits from this source and develop them by training and supervision in the skills required of a consultant.

Other specialists have chosen to become freelance consultants because they have been made redundant or have taken early retirement. For many in this group, the notion of consultancy is not about the professional skills involved but more about their commercial relationship with those who are paying them - they are no longer employees, but self-employed contractors. Some will continue to confine their role to specialist subcontractor, while others will develop consultancy skills.

For those in a consultancy practice, there is a choice of role. Consultants can be simply the trained providers of a proprietary product or promoted as experts in their own right. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. The practice with proprietary consultancy approaches will presumably market them as such, so a newcomer to the market has therefore not only to develop a new approach, and to prove that it is workable, but also to challenge the brand of the established provider. By contrast, if the consultancy product is vested in the skills of an individual consultant, it is easy for the specialist to leave this employment and take his or her skills - and possibly clients - to another employer, or set up his or her own consultancy business. This is of course how some of even the most venerable of the consultancies in the United Kingdom were started.




The Top Consultant. Developing Your Skills for Greater Effectiveness
The Top Consultant: Developing your Skills for Greater Effectiveness
ISBN: 0749442530
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 89

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