Is consultancy right for you?
Published: 2023-01-03 00:06:20

I wanted to reflect on 2022 and with January usually being a popular time for people to move jobs hopefully my reflections can help someone with their next move.
At the start of 2022 I was wrapping up my first year as a consultant at Infinity Works and a year of working with Cinch. What an incredible experience that was, my first exposure to serverless (with a small 's' and a big 'S'). Cinch have an incredible engineering culture. They play a big part in the local meet-up scene and featured in Werner Vogels' reInvent keynote talk. Check out Toli's talk at GOTO EDA Day from September https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM-dTroS0FA.
What's my point?
I imagine you're thinking "that sounds great, how is that helpful to me?". I've done a fair bit of interviewing at IW of the last couple of years. One of the worries people have about joining consulting is that people don't like the sound of short projects. The start of 2023 finds me almost a year in with my second client. I've definitely had shorter tenures in previous non consultancy roles. Some of my colleagues have spent over 2 years at a single client.
Don't let short engagements put you off consultancy. They exist but there are lots of opportunities for longer stints if you want them.
In February I rotated to a different client as a tech lead for a mixed team of onshore and offshore colleagues. The tech stack was similar but the culture is very different. This client is in the health space and as such have a very different approach to governance and risk. I found it difficult to accept the change of pace. Going from multiple deployments to production a day, to maybe one a week, felt like exchanging a sports car for a people carrier (probably, I've never driven either). Also, considering the reduced appetite for risk the team thought that bundling a weeks worth of changes into each release wasn't the ideal strategy. With that in mind we started making a plan for introducing continuous deployment.
What's my point?
Another of the common questions we get in interviews is about the impact consultants can have at a client. It's a great question to ask. Lots of people are familiar with Daniel Pink and the intrinsic motivators: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Some candidates worry about being a "bum on a seat" without much input into technology decisions or how a company runs and that leaves them without that autonomy and purpose. That's not been my, admittedly short, experience. I think the continuous delivery working group is an example of this, when it's complete it'll be a massive change from the current way of working (although we'll get there through evolution, not revolution). It's not the only example, we've helped with technology strategy, company culture, even recruitment (which might seem unusual for a consultancy to help a client with something that'll end with fewer billable hours but that's what we did). If you're thinking about consultancy check out some of the things we've worked on over at our website. https://www.infinityworks.com/work/
In April I became a certified architect and a certified Kanban professional and in December I completed a 2 week data engineering course. I know there are mixed opinions about certification. For what it's worth I learned a tonne on both courses and found them valuable. I've also been to a couple of conferences: GOTO EDA day and AWS community summit.
What's my point?
My point is that I've received as much training in 2 years of consultancy as probably the last 10 years working for product companies. There's more to it than this but the fact is that the more we know, the more useful we are to our clients and the more billable we can be. There's a clear return on investment for the training we receive and most of my colleagues have been given time and money to work on something whether it's cloud certification, agile or leadership training, books or something else.
I don't want to give the impression that consultants are just billable resources to our leadership. We're absolutely not, our leadership are great and show a genuine interest in us. There's no pressure to train on a path set out for us. Our career journeys are in our own hands.
One final quick thing to mention. I ruled out consultancy in the past because I didn't like the idea of lots of travel. I think I've spent approximately 6 nights away from home in the last 2 years. Take this with a pinch of salt because there's been this unheard of thing called COVID that's somewhat limited travel but Infinity Works have regional offices and aim to place our consultants with local clients. It's not always possible, but considering that everyone is much more remote friendly these days and there are increasingly more companies and government agencies setting up outside London, being away from home might not be the deal breaker that it used to be.
I work with some amazing colleagues at IW, consultancy can be a career fast track. I wish I'd made the leap years ago.
Best of luck with whatever you decide to do in 2023!