Consulting – What’s that like?

It’s been about two years at my first consultancy in my decade-old career and “I’m Lovin’ It!”.

Having started my career with a bank and after working my way up the chain for almost a decade after which I thought I was done. At that point I knew I wanted to do something different. But then came along a small to mid-sized testing services consultancy. I didn’t know what to expect. What kind of clients will I have? What do I need to prepare for? How will I manage constantly changing expectations and environments?

When you work for a captive or one customer per say, you tend to get comfortable, VERY comfortable! You have days when you are not inclined to bring anything to the table. I had those days with my previous employer and I tried to innovate and automate in the technical and process space and yet ran out of things to do. I was either good at my work or was doing the wrong job. I brought some spectacular ideas to the table only to be thrown the other way because of unnecessary management issues or my inability to convince an audience that had been doing the same thing since the beginning of time.

After moving to a consultancy I realised I was working towards specific goals. I was working with the particular skills I had on specific work packets and when I was done it was time to move on. There is no “idle time” to fill and hence be provided with some pointless project that has no meaning at the end. Moreover you have no time to get involved in management politics and you don’t have to spend endless years to grow. Also to get the opportunity to see different colours of the spectrum was just too tempting. In the last two years, I have worked within the Digital, Banking, Insurance, Government, Superannuation and Telecom space. The experience I have had working with different clients from these domains was just too invaluable.

I’m very different! WHY?! I like being under stress. I love having constant deadlines. In the Performance Testing space well there’s only STRESS (pun intended). As we usually come in when either things go wrong or at the end of every software lifecycle, because everyone has screwed up and running late, we are always under constant stress. That is a good and bad thing though. This isn’t for everyone. And with working for a consultancy we’re usually deployed at locations that have things breaking or need things broken for them. (Who wouldn’t love doing this?!)

I was once asked that now I was done with one project if I’d like to take it easy, and my reply was ‘no way’. I’m off to the next one. And that was the best part. The plus point of working with a consultancy is that there is a great level of knowledge and expertise within the organisation. Plus we have access to every tooling in the area to play with. This surely helps to increase learning and expand your knowledge overtime.

To conclude, I’d like to say that if you haven’t tried consulting, and love a challenging environment and the ability to learn and experiment with the latest tooling out there, this is a place to be.

(Note: This is my first consultancy and this might not be the case with every consultancy out there and probably might just be my organisation. Then I’m glad to say I’d love to refer you if you are 1. In the Testing domain or DevOps domain. 2. In Australia, UK or India)

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