Impact as Consultant

Its tough to make an impact or see the impact when a huge proportion of the work is ppt slides and the ideas/recommendations hardly get executed. I personally stuggled with Strategy Consulting and consciously moved to Supply Chain & Operations Consulting. In this space I found a lot of my work (not all) getting implemented and driving value. But there was still a sizeable part of my work which never saw light of day and was done "for the sake" of it.

My biggest lesson is this- if the work that you are doing is not creating a pleasant experience in you (learning, achievement, progress, helping someone else etc), find something that will. Life is too short to waste doing things for the sake of it.

Having said this Consulting taught me solid skills- problem solving, structured thinking, presentation skills, storytelling etc,

Hi there,

I, personally, did not. I felt like I created a bunch of powerpoint slides than a group of executives read, patted themselves on the back for, and then never implemented/incorporated.

That said, I know many people who feel otherwise - i.e. who say that the work we do does have impact, but the changes simply take time and are so big they are hard to see.

As an (IT) Implementation consultant I felt like what I did had much more impact. Why? It was measurable. We would literally build and deploy a functioning IT system in a matter of months that real users logged into and used.