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Of course, you need to "know your stuff" in your own consulting field. You need to be a subject matter expert. If you're an information technology consultant, you need the technical knowledge and problem-solving savvy to give the client the expected result. Same for other business consultants, such as financial and marketing consultants. Same for consumer consultants, such as image, beauty or health consultants. If you don't know your stuff, you need to learn it at a job, or work with a more experienced consultant until you do.
Some consultants work in professions that are regulated by the law. These include lawyers, architects, and doctors, among many others. Obviously, if you need a license or certificate to do the work that will give the client the expected result, then by all means get it. Other certifications are optional. You take a test from a private company and become a Certified Network Engineer, for example. Certifications often help increase your credibility, and give an independent view of your training and knowledge. In addition, you can network with others who hold that certification.
As a consultant, you also will need interpersonal and communications skills:
* Interpersonal skills in order to close sales, and even to persuade your client to act on your advice!
* Communications skills such as making presentations and writing documents so that you can convey your value and your results to the client, in other words, so that the client can see what they've bought.
The good news is that these skills can be learned. And, you can be yourself. Some consultants are known for being difficult to deal with. That's OK - as long as they bring in the results for the client.
Finally, as a consultant, you need business management skills. You are not tying up funds in inventory or equipment, so in all honesty, the needed business skills are modest. You must keep track of your assets, cash, accounts receivable and bills. Inexpensive and readily available small business accounting and billing software can help you do this.
You need a basic level of organization to deal with a few repetitive tasks (such as getting bills out every month). This can be more complicated if you have several partners or operate in several locations, or if you delegate tasks to a staff. In The E-Myth Revisited, author and business consultant Michael E. Gerber explains how to think of your business like a "franchise" and develop procedures that can be easily applied by your personnel.
Apart from watching your cash, you must plan to focus on marketing. Far too many consultants put too much time into their technical skills and not enough into marketing. Or, even if they do think about marketing, it's haphazard and erratic. To be a real success, that won't work. Your marketing needs to be systematic and repeatable.
Know your subject matter, get needed certifications, develop your interpersonal and communications skills as well as business management, organizational and marketing skills. Master these and you should be well on your way to success in consulting.
Do you find your company hiring employees for their technical skills and firing them for performance issues? Many companies focus on hiring and promoting employees based on technical skills. What is wrong with this picture? Hiring for technical skills overlooks the fact that people are people, not robots.
People develop very deep behavioral competencies, both good and bad, throughout their lives. These behavioral competencies have an impact on the very work habits and attitudes they bring to the workplace. In addition, few employees are fired for lack of technical skills or ability. A much larger percentage are fired for performance issues.
Have you ever seen the technical whiz who was an outstanding performer promoted to a leadership position who couldn't let go of the technical duties and who was also a poor leader? How about incidents of hiring new employees with the right technical skills only to find some essential performance skill missing?
Over the years, I've listened to many managers lament that many of their employees lacked the right attitude to be successful. Probing further, I've found that when we focused on attitude, the real problems ranged from a lack of self-control under pressure, little diligence in getting the job done, lack of flexibility in dealing with change, poor teamwork, or a lack of similar abilities.
What managers categorized as attitude actually could be defined and measured. Let me share an example. At one company, a customer service representative who took orders from customers was found to have over $300,000 in unprocessed orders, spanning over three months, in her desk. This was $300,000 of lost opportunity for the company. Why? It wasn't because she didn't know how to operate the computer system. This person lacked capability in such competencies as attention to detail, commitment to task, and customer service focus, all essential to this position.
Can software engineers, accountants, marketing managers, or other employees have a similar impact on the bottom line?
Finding ways to increase the effectiveness of the selection process to reduce the number of bad hires is becoming increasingly important, especially in today's tight labor market. Hiring a warm body that produces little is expensive. Many companies are placing more emphasis on finding and keeping human assets in order to stay ahead of the competition.
The most widely used selection tool is the employment interview. In spite of the wide use of interviews, recent research has confirmed that the traditional interview has only a 15% to 30% chance of accurately predicting job performance. Using a structured process, based on a job-specific analysis of essential competencies, can achieve better than to 80% reliability in predicting job performance.
The key to achieving better than 80% reliability is combining a competency and behavioral-based interviewing process to measure and predict job performance before hiring potential employees. The competency-based process should include both technical and behavioral competencies to ensure the essential competencies are present for success in the position.
Once a structured interview is created, a behavioral-based interview is used to collect job-related examples of behavior from a candidate.
Whether or not you believe people are a company's most important resource, each hiring decision affects the company directly in terms of salary and benefits. They affect the bottom line in terms of morale, image, or customer satisfaction. Hiring for technical skills without assessing the behavioral competencies is like buying car with out driving it. You can tell it's a car, but you don't know if you are going to get what you expect.