idBlog
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
What am I doing with my career...?
I'm told that I'm at a "cross-roads" at this stage in my career - I need to make a decision. In the words of the management consulting world, I need to decide between being a subject matter expert (a SME) who delivers professional advisory services and being a manager who focuses on selling services to clients. A SME is the "hired gun" whose services are sold to clients by managers and business developers. The typical economic model for a (publicly held) consulting company has SMEs and other more junior consultants earning compensation equal to some portion of the hourly bill-rate that is charged to the client. Meanwhile, managers and business developers get paid significantly more (in salary and bonuses) than the SMEs because they are seen as directly responsible for generating the revenue from the services sold. So it would seem that the decision comes down to "how much money do I want to make?" and "do I want to pay the price to make that kind of money?"
I thought that I had already made this decision after a thoughtful meeting with a colleague toward the end of 2009. I had decided that I do not want to follow the career path that leads to a focus on business development and selling. I don't want to sell the work; I want to be the expert who does the work and is fulfilled by doing it.
However, now I'm wondering. I'm wondering whether I need to invest some time and energy to ensure that I have control over the things I get to work on. If I leave it up to some group of managers and business developers, I'll be called upon to work on whichever client projects are bringing in revenue at any given time. But if I can build up a small group of people who can develop delivery assets, generate client demand and sell a consistently replenishing pipeline of business, then I could, in theory, be free to focus on the projects that I want to work on. Once again, I guess it boils down to the question of "is the freedom to decide how I spend my time worth the up-front investment?"
Labels: career, consulting
posted @ 9:26 PM
