Consulting as a Career Choice

Working as a part of a consulting team on a fast-moving project for a demanding client on one of their critical issues is one of the best learning and development opportunities you can have.  For some people, consulting may be one of several phases in their overall career in which they rapidly gain experience and skills, and after 3 or 4 years, decide to join a client organization or a regulatory body; for others, consulting becomes a long-term career.  Either way, consulting can be a rewarding career experience.

Consulting with ERM offers the opportunity to use your technical knowledge and skills across a wide range of different client organizations, with their different needs, priorities and cultures, in a relatively short period of time.  You get the chance to work alongside people with great technical and consulting experience and to learn quickly from them. 

We appreciate that consulting is not the career choice for everyone.  It requires a set of values and motivations that don’t appeal to everyone. Take a look at the following list and see how you match up.

• You appreciate that environmental and social issues are business issues, with business impacts for clients and you want to use your technical knowledge to help clients solve their problems.  All consultants require a basis of expertise, but it is the ability to use these to help someone else solve their problems that makes you a consultant rather than a technical expert.
   
• You have an interest in business issues and in being part of a global team.  You are a natural solver of problems: you identify issues, develop solutions, evaluate these, select one and get this implemented.
   
• You are highly self-motivated and function well both independently and within a team.  People want you to be on their team because you work collaboratively and quickly build trust with colleagues and clients. You do what is needed for your team and others to succeed and you are fun to work with.  
   
• You are a good communicator – you listen well, and are quick to understand what people are really saying and can explain complex technical issues in straight-forward ways to non-specialist audiences.
   
• You are good at working with a wide range of people, both in the client organization and ERM, and across different cultures. As a consultant, you don’t have direct control over a client who is making a decision about working with ERM, or perhaps over colleagues in another office on whom you have to depend to deliver a successful project to your client.  You need to be able use your influencing and interpersonal skills to gain the support of others to help you find information that you need.  
   
  
• Consulting is a fast-paced, dynamic environment and you need to thrive on this. You enjoy variety and are good at dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty.  A consultant’s lifestyle can be unpredictable and often involves working away from home and in cultures other than your own.  Sometimes you won’t know until Friday what you will be doing the following Monday. You need to be adaptable: sometimes your client won’t have the data you need and you need to be able to think quickly about alternative approaches.
   
• You want to achieve.  You have a focus on getting results and are not put off by difficulties.  As a consultant, you will often work within tight timescales and budget constraints.  You need to have determination and commitment to achieve your best under these circumstances.
   
• You are entrepreneurial and commercial. We always want to achieve more with less for our clients and ourselves.  We are a business, our clients are businesses or organizations with high-performance standards – you need to be able to see the commercial implications of technical or project issues.
   
• And last, but most important, you have a sense of excellence and integrity, in everything you do.

If you answer ‘yes’ to most of these in terms of your skills, preferences and aspirations, then you sound like the right kind of person to talk to us about an exciting, challenging and rewarding career in consulting.  So, please do get in touch with us.