My Transition from Developer to Consultant
by NAMAN BHANSALI
Not too long ago, I went from being a Software Engineer/developer to being a consultant. What exactly is consulting? According to dictionary.com, a consultant is a person who gives professional or expert advice. This is my story of how my transition has been so far.
At my old job, working 9 to 5 at a telecommunication interconnect company I was able to gain a lot of technical experience from very complex computer science problems. These issues always kept me engaged and had my mind in a continuous flux. Above all, I was having fun doing it and learning as much as I could. Here are a few topics and tasks I got a good amount of exposure in:
- Various Algorithms and the advantages/disadvantages of using one over the other.
- In-depth knowledge of SQL including things like memory allocation between Stored Procedures, Indexes, JOINS, ORDER and GROUP BY clauses, cursors.
- Database Normalization, the number of tables and columns I was dealing with was massive and this was crucial in optimizing response times.
- Creating complex, but easy to use UI pages. I was using a .net Framework and was doing back-end and front-end development. Being knee-deep in C#, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, HTML/CSS, and KendoUI.
- Creating scripts to handle large amounts of data files using Perl or Python. For example, having to accumulate thousands of files into certain sizes.
This is what it felt like to be a true computer scientist. I had been provided with 3 monitors and was working diligently with deadlines from week to week. Making improvements in existing code or writing new code. Fresh out of college, I worked exactly two whole years being a true computer scientist. My coworkers were fun to work with and I got along with all of them, I would often hang out with them outside of the office.
Somehow, I still managed to feel a void in my career. As a computer science major, I have always been told there are two paths. One path where you are more business oriented, but you lose your technical edge; and one path where you are very technical but don’t have a knack for business. Well at this point in my career, I didn’t know what to choose.
So I decided to make my goal at the time to obtain both. Somehow, I had to find a way to keep up with my technical skills, meaning I had to always be developing something to stay up to date with the technology; and I had to refine my business skills, meaning understanding business processes and applying my technical knowledge to present clients with results. After doing a few interviews, I landed a job at a consulting firm.
I figured a consultant’s job was so vague that it meant consultants could do both; they could be technical and they could focus on the business. After joining the consulting firm, I was expecting to fall right into this perfect niche where I would take my technical knowledge and put it to good business use. Well I soon found out that the perfect middle ground between the two isn’t as clear as day.
It has only been eight months on the job, but I have realized that even in the consulting world there is a split between subject matter experts and functional experts. There are very few people who take the path where you tackle both, and even if they do, they have a strong suit and a weaker one.
At my current job, I am in a role where I am geared to succeed as a subject matter expert in Cyber Risk and more specifically Identity Management.
Identity Management is defined as a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system (such as a country, a network, or an enterprise) and controlling their access to resources within that system by associating user rights and restrictions with the established identity (Source).
Considering my last job was very technical, I have been placed in a subject matter expert role, but the work I am doing isn’t nearly as technical as it was at my first job. Along with becoming a subject matter expert I am stepping in and trying to pick up any functional work that I can get my hands on. Such as PRD (Proposal Research & Development), business presentations, technical writing, and demos to clients. Consulting has served it’s purpose, for now.
The issue comes when I get promoted to the next level. In the consulting hierarchy there comes a time where the employee has to choose a path. You literally have to decide whether your title will be a specialist or a “consultant”. Now to the firm, the split makes sense. Each employee is a resource and all you’re doing is organizing your resources. However, this means this decision will have an effect on the rest of my career.
A resume is a reflection of past experiences and what a candidate can bring to the table. My first job was very technical and consulting has been a good mixture of both. Depending on what I choose, it will dictate what I will do my further studies in. So, until I have to choose, I will continue partaking in both technical and functional work as a consultant.
View my follow-up to the above post here: https://medium.com/@naman12345/am-i-still-a-consultant-562e1cd11448
