Great consultants adapt easily to new projects, work cultures and colleagues. Great consultants work hard and smart. Find in-person consulting opportunities and remote consulting jobs. Look for consulting jobs at Fortune 500 companies that are looking for trained and experienced freelancers.
Find innovative ideas quickly and at the right price. Use our crowdsourcing platform to get ideas from a community of more than 1 million creative problem solvers. Check if you have the 6 most common personality traits of successful consultants. Trust is also a key trait, but the willingness to tackle difficult projects must also be accompanied by a realistic sense of what is actually possible.
Confidence to tackle difficult projects must also be accompanied by a realistic sense of what is truly possible. Successful consultants can offer clients realistic time frames for completing work, even when that schedule is contrary to what the client wants to hear. If you try to concentrate a week's work on two days, you'll most likely end up disappointing the customer with poor quality delivery. Becoming a successful consultant with a steady stream of projects probably won't happen overnight.
As with most things in life, you'll have to be patient and persevere to achieve your goals. This patience also extends to your customers; you may have to thoroughly explain technical concepts several times (and they may not yet understand them), or you may have to accommodate a difficult customer. Consulting isn't a 9-to-5 job. You might feel like you're “always connected,” as you're expected to spend a lot of time on the road and it can be tiring.
If you envision stability and structure, consider a career elsewhere. So, you can design your work to a large extent, Wouter said. To work in consulting, you'll have to create your own work structures and be responsible for your impact. Consulting firms are looking for people who thrive in positions of responsibility and who have the intuition needed to lead a team and face a challenge.
If you've led a team or a society on campus, organized an event, or founded a group, these are all great examples of your leadership potential. Consultants tend to be predominantly entrepreneurial people, which means that they tend to be quite natural leaders who thrive on influencing and persuading others. Consultants score high on extraversion, meaning that they rely on external stimuli to be happy, such as people or an exciting environment. While you might think that means that consulting is only for extroverts and extroverts, there are plenty of ways that introverts can also thrive as independent consultants.
Therefore, consulting firms are looking for candidates who can get along well with the rest of the team, who have the ability to build relationships at all levels of an organization, and who are fundamentally good at meeting new people.
