Moving into a consultancy career can seem a little daunting, and that’s especially the case when you’ll be juggling your budding career alongside family life around the home. As with any career, figuring out the best ways to strike a delicate balance between work obligations and your personal life is vital.
So what sort of things can you do to ensure that your new journey into consultancy is a smooth one? The Consultant Hub looks to provide you with some helpful advice that can benefit you in your new career.
Take stock and plan from early on
If you’re thinking about going into consultancy work, a good first step is to get a general plan of action in place so you’re ready to hit the ground running.
Things you should think about in the planning stage include:
- What skills my background gives me and why they’re useful in consultancy
- What unique service, benefit, or feature can I provide to clients
- What are possible distractions in my home and life that may affect my work
- How much should I charge to provide a good income
Once you’ve put some preparatory information together like this, you’ll be able to take your first well-prepared leap into consultancy work. It might even be worth writing a new CV that you put together specifically to emphasise your consultancy skillset. You can find out a little about how to do this by reading this article on how to tailor your CV for a consultancy role.
Good planning at the start will help make sure the start of your career isn’t as rocky as you might worry, which lets you push on to even greater success quicker while also causing less stress and impact on the home life.
Starting slow
That said, even with an extremely thorough plan in place, you don’t want to move too quickly and risk burning yourself out as you take on too large a workload too early.
Don’t worry if you start with just one or two clients to begin with. As time passes, more clients with materialise. The main thing to keep in mind, though, is effectively managing several workloads over a certain period.
That’s why it can be beneficial to start with only a few clients and build up over time. You can gradually increase the amount of clients you take on until you feel like you’ve struck the perfect balance between work and home life, and that you’re able to work as efficiently as possible for each of the clients alongside that.
To help you figure out the perfect workload for you, consider doing research on all possible clients, such as by checking their LinkedIn profile, to gauge business size and potential amount of work to be done. This will help you make informed decisions on how much work you’ll be doing at any one time.
A learning process
Your skills and experiences as a consultant aren’t set in stone either. Whatever industry you’re coming from, your background will give you a great starting point. However, what you learn and adapt to through the course of your consultancy career will help push you to new heights and be an even more effective consultant going forward.
As you spend more and more time as a consultant, perhaps you could consider revisiting the plan you made at the start of your career. You might realise that you’ve learned some new and very useful skills to use in your career, or that you’ve got enough of a reputation in the industry that you could push for additional high-profile clients within an industry which can take you to even greater successes as a consultant.
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