What is tech consultancy? Tech consultancy is simply the practice of advising organisations on how best to leverage technology to achieve and advance their aims and goals, via invoking their technical expertise.
Consultancy is already a large and varied field, with some very large companies operating in the field, such as KPMG, BCG, Deloitte, Accenture, etc. They operate in a wide range of capacities, which includes mergers and acquisitions, asset management, business strategy, amongst others, although there is a growing capacity for tech consulting. This provides a great opportunity for you, whether you are a computer science, electrical engineering, IT or other student with a tech background, to build up various organisations’ tech capacity to achieve their business goals.
What steps can you take to get into tech consultancy?
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Possess and develop strong communication skills - it is brilliant that you understand and are able to operate complex, high tech IT systems, however it doesn’t help the people you are helping if you can’t translate these complex systems to terms that can be understood by people in the realm of business, finances, management, etc
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Stay up to date with developing technology trends - if emerging and constantly developing fields, such as AI, quantum computing, DevOps, etc, are appearing on the radars of many institutions, businesses and governments, chances are the business you are advising will also be interested, therefore it is good to always stay in the loop will all of the latest tech developments so that you are in the best possible position to advice your organisation on how and whether to leverage these developments
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Understand what clients wish to know - they probably won’t be very interested in whether you and the IT team have selected to opt for Microsoft Azure instead of AWS due to the underlying architecture, for example, they will want to know why that particular difference will be more beneficial to them as an organisation; it is important to analyse your tech decisions from a perspective both as a tech professional, but also as a business
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Even if you will not be initially working for a consultancy company such as the aforementioned, you may still very well find opportunities to advise whatever organisation you work for on their usage of tech - particularly if you are in a role of a systems analyst or ERP integration manager, this will be beneficial as you already have experience in advising organisations on their IT usage
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If you are reading this and you are in a non tech role but still a consultancy role, and you are interested in going into tech consultancy, you are still in a good position to do so - through your work you already have significant experience in understanding clients’ needs and challenges, therefore you will find it easier to better suit technology solutions to clients’ needs