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Hi,
I am planning a switch from software development to IT consultant role once my MBA is finished. I still have 2 years to go and in a position where I need to select my electives for 3rd sem. I am now starting to do research, what all options are there for software developer to move into consulting. Will it be a difficult move and what all challenges I need to face and what electives will be useful. Any IT consultant here who can give bit of advise on this?
Thanks
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How can you be a consultant if you haven't got any practical experience? To be a consultant you really should have a background of problems solved - without that, as a consultant, you're just a warm body occupying a seat.
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Indeed consultancy should be based on experience with previous projects.
Simon Lee Shugar (Software Developer)
www.simonshugar.co.uk
"If something goes by a false name, would it mean that thing is fake? False by nature?" By Gilbert Durandil
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: a warm body occupying a seat
This must be the very definition of 90% of consultants-
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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I dunno: if they are sitting down you can find the buggers - and then the lack of useful knowledge is exposed...
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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No mate, a consultant is a person who borrows your watch to tell you the time.
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And then keeps your watch as his fee!
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: How can you be a consultant if you haven't got any practical experience?
I always thought the term consultant meant unemployed.
I don't know about other countries but in the US that term is so generic it doesn't actually mean anything, at least in my experience.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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RyanDev wrote: I always thought the term consultant meant unemployed.
And still they take fatter paychecks... haha Well I always thought the same but as now am pursuing MBA, I can actually see the importance of consultant which we software engineers don't usually understand.
For me at least, I want be out there instead of sitting in front of computer and coding day in day out.. Saying that, I will not get rid of programming so easily. I have plenty of my own projects that I can work on..
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: How can you be a consultant if you haven't got any practical experience?
And how will you get that experience ? You have to start somewhere. I am working as a software developer but at my free time I have offered my companY to help them solve Business/Finance/IT related issues. And also pursuing MBA from one of the top business school helps. I think if I plan properly I can get enough experience to land into top 4 consulting company after I graduate. But still not sure what roles can I look for as a I don't want to leave IT and want to use both (Software Egineering & MBA) degree in my next role.
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You get that experience by doing the pre-consultancy jobs. I have seen many companies that have flown in these "fresh out of university" graduates and I have yet to see one who has had the experience to back things up when it all goes pear shaped. The best consultants I've ever worked with have all had extensive business exposure beforehand.
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I think you are right. May be I need to look for per-consultancy jobs after graduation and then move into proper consultancy role. It's bit complicated than I thought. 
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That sounds like a good plan to me.
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I always thought a Consultant was someone who had to travel more than 30 miles to get to your site, and carried a briefcase. 
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"Consultant" is so vague a term, and may actually be understood very differently depending on whom you are talking to. In our company, IT consultants = people who answer the hotline when I have a problem with Excel. I doubt this is what you are planning to do as a job.
So first piece of advice : know what you want to do exactly. Evaluate how much time you would like to code, how much time you would like to do meetings with people, how much time you would like to try and find new contracts. This will then define what type of consultants you want to be.
I was being sarcastic in my other post about consultants being useless meat, but good consultants are precious - I use them here sometimes to introduce organizational changes, just because the ideas are taken more seriously when coming from someone with a tie who is not from the same company. But I digress, good consultants can really be helpful if they bring a lot of experience with them. I'd never hire someone with <10 years business experience if I want to get support on a project organisation. I might hire someone with 5 to 10 years experience if I, for instance, only want technical help.
Second piece of advice : be prepared to sometimes do the wrong thing. Consulting is a business, and you should prepare for the case where the customer decides against your idea and you have to implement what he wants.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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If you can convince companies to hire you as an IT consultant straight out of an MBA, you're in the wrong profession. You should go into politics or be a used car salesman.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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AndyInUK wrote: what all challenges I need to face
Consultancy isn't about technical skill, it is about business skill.
Can you talk to people? Can you respond politely even when someone (customer) is bordering on being abusive? Can you sell yourself? Can you create a plan that allows you to make money? Do you know how to structure contracts to insure that you will be protected from legal actions. Etc...
You will not succeed unless you succeed at the business skills. But, even if your technical skills are lacking you can still succeed if your business skills are good.
As for the other comments that seem to suggest you don't have enough experience, even if that were true, there are many small businesses that need a bit of help and can't afford a highly skilled person.
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How often do companies employ / nurture this breed of developers, who specialize only on the UI?
For example, in my company, we do WPF & the developer has to deal with both UI & non UI modules. It looks seriously hectic for the same person to work on both ends of the project. Going through this over and over, I feel like insisting my boss to go for a specialized UI developer who would be an expert in Layouts, Styles, Graphic objects design (not in Photoshop, but on WPF/XAML) , Storyboards and animations etc. Can you share how UI tasks are done on your teams?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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For our web apps (which is almost all that is now done here aside from a few mobile apps) we have a web designer who takes what the proper devs do and formats, styles, moves around the layout of the UI.
For everything else the dev is responsible for everything and it is usually someone from the business who requests changes to the layout or use of the UI. Many systems look crap and are horrible to use for that reason, especially some bought in systems.
I have always had an interest in making the UI as usable as possible, and to do that you need to know your users, we are often kept remote from them here which I think is a mistake.
When designing a Windows UI and building one I always worked out how the user would be entering the data, what did they already know or use, how could I make it slow their jobs down as little as possible.
For example we had a winforms app running on toughbooks with touchscreens. The users were engineers who stabbed at the screen with fingers or the back ends of pens. We collected time entries from them. So I created a control that was designed to make stabbing a time into the thing as easy as possible, then I tried to do it wrong as many different ways as I could think, then I got a couple of users to use it.
Too many devs expect the user to use a screen the same way that they do, and doing anything a different way can cause unexpected results which is then the user's fault for not using it properly.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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UI/UX is a very different beast to functional development. I have worked in front-end a lot, but I would not describe myself as a UI/UX developer.
They exist and if you can get a good one they are very good. The average ones don't have enough flair to be designers or brains to be developers.
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We have an old system here, developed externally then the source code bought for in house maintenance, that is full of screens that look very, very much like that.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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I can't imagine doing WPF development without a specialized UI developer. In a recent project (my first WPF project) we have exactly that person, and it makes life a heck of a lot easier. The web development I've done has been mostly records management so we've gotten away without a UI developer.
Marc
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Other areas of the business (mostly web stuff) have UI/UX developers.
I tend to work on my own so do the GUI in WPF - i even write my own database engines and programming languages so I am all over the problem domain 
I have shown the GUIs I have developed to some of the UI/UX guys and besides the occasional, very marginal, colour change they couldn't fault them - which was nice.
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