How to make the most of a period as a consultant when you are looking for a full-time job
Consulting is a part of your career too! When supporting people looking for a new job during a period of transition you will often have to assess whether to accept appointments as a consultant.
A person whose profile is developing might be concerned about the impact such appointments could have on their reputation.
Since my assumption is that it is better to have a job when you are looking for a new one, and that it is better to have a position as a consultant than no position at all, I wanted to look at how you can make the most of this type of experience when describing it in your CV or in a job interview. In this regard, I read and saved an article from Ivi Exec entitled “How to leverage consulting projects to land a full-time job”.
This confirms that in the US - which is a benchmark for so many things - there are workers facing a professional deadlock. In general, therefore, after working for a few years, your CV might highlight the fact that you worked for a company for a short period (perhaps as an employee) or there might be some months where you didn’t work or periods where you only worked on a part-time basis or even worked on two projects at once. And the longer you have worked, then the more chance of there being additional periods like this. It goes without saying that, when you’re over 60, you’ll probably only land consulting roles, but that’s another matter.
How to make the most of consulting experience in your career
The first point involves grouping together these mixed or brief experiences which I discussed above, under a chapter like this:
Independent management consultant on areas relating to …. (list the areas you were involved in, such as: Strategic Business Development, Digital Marketing, …).
If you have many appointments of this sort you might have a list with bullet points containing some details for each appointment (just a couple of lines). You might also have had different periods like this throughout your working career and instead of breaking up the continuity of your CV, you could have a chapter dedicated exclusively to consulting roles which you could organise by subject matter and state your roles and maybe even highlight the results or your contribution to the organisation.
The second issue to deal with is a concern that your interrogator might not be impressed. Remember that there are all sorts of different people and more business-minded people will be interested in what you can do rather than the uniqueness of your CV. An entrepreneur, the head of a division or function might see you as a problem-fixer, rather than someone with a seamless CV or someone who has performed the same job for years and years without developing any new competencies or knowledge.
Don’t be intimidated by networking and pursuing opportunities at the C-suite, SVP, and Senior Director levels—these people have a different perspective on what constitutes a valuable hire compared to lower-level gatekeepers. The top leadership doesn’t care if your qualifications match up with a job posting. They’re interested in identifying and solving problems that affect the business.
– Anish Majumdar
So let’s turn things round: let’s make the most of your consulting roles, as if they were periods of employment in their own right …. They might even be more valuable: you can show an ability to bring value independently of a complex support structure, and prove that you know the area or subject matter in question and have leadership or entrepreneurial skills, or, at the very least, some initiative.
If the time you spend in consulting roles increases over time, don’t dismiss or underestimate this and make sure you make these experiences the culmination of your competencies and soft skills I talked about before: leadership and entrepreneurship.
Are you worried about a “Gotcha!” moment when the interviewer will ask about your unconventional work history? Avoid it by raising the issue on your own. Discuss the challenges, learning moments, and hard-won victories you gained consulting. Don’t shirk away from your experience—it gave you exclusive insights and is a powerful differentiator. Most other candidates won’t have the “in the trenches” expertise you’ve spent years refining.
– Anish Majumdar
Are you not convinced?
I understand this might seem very new in our conservative and provincial culture, but believe me, the world is evolving and I really mean what I am saying.
At GoodGoing! we can help you achieve these things in practice. We’ll soon be publishing an article with a case study on this topic.
