What Experience Do You Need To Be A Consultant?

How much experience you have really doesn't matter that much. What kind of experience you have is far more important.

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Many people decide to become a consultant after spending a decade or two working in-house for organisations.

Browsing a few consultant’s websites today, many proudly promote their ‘[xx] years of experience in [sector]’.

For some, it is the main selling point they promote. They position themselves as the ‘experienced’ option.

But your years of experience probably aren’t as powerful a selling point as you might think. Worse yet, the wrong kind of experience can do more harm than good.

Is Your Experience Working Against You?

I spent about a year working for the United Nations in Geneva.

It’s incredibly hard to be fired from working at the UN. This means it’s an organisation which tends to have a lot of people who have worked there for 20 to 30 years.

This gives them deep institutional knowledge, but often an outdated skillset. They have a lot of experience, but when things change, as things have that annoying tendency to do, their experience often begins working against them.

My role was to build communities and grow our external engagement channels. As YouTube was exploding in popularity, I knew we had to engage on that platform. But I needed to go through the ‘head of video’ to create videos. The head of video didn’t know much about YouTube, but agreed she agreed to create videos for YouTube.

But every video she produced was the same. It opened with a panning shot of a refugee camp, a monotone narrator explaining how bad things were, and a call to support the work of the UN. Her video experience was great for producing videos for world news channels on TV, but terrible for a YouTube audience.

Things had suddenly changed and her experience was now working against her. Even when I showed her the stats that highlighted almost nobody was getting past the ‘opening panning shot’ she refused to change it. She felt she was right and the audience was wrong.

This is the other danger of experience, it can be harder to change your mind without taking a hit to your pride.

Aside: The only time any video gained any traction was when my boss snuck a bunch of cheap camcorders into refugee camps, asked refugees to film their lives, and then published the results on the channel. It was shaky, grainy, and raw. It was more powerful than anything else we had done.

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Diverse Experience Is Probably Better Than Singular Experience

I know a consultant who worked at a large organisation for a long time and with great success.

The consultant then went independent and used that success to attract clients.

But then the consultant ran into trouble. Every recommendation they made was for their client to be more like their former employer.

The consultant left a trail of failures in their wake because they didn’t have a consulting methodology, they simply highlighted where the new client wasn’t like their past employer and said they should change.

This is the danger of working at a single organisation for a long-time. You don’t know how much of your success you should attribute to your organisation’s unique context. You don’t know what strategies can be applied to other organisations and which only worked at your organisation.

They didn’t appreciate that their former employee had a unique situation (higher budget, rapid growth, lots of internal support) that isn’t applicable to new clients.

For consulting, diverse experience is better than working at a single organisation for a long time. You get to appreciate the importance of context and realise which things work across multiple organisations and which only work at a unique organisation.

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Can You Translate Experience Translate Into Benefits For Clients?

I was inspired by this post from The Management Consultant.

I once had this German fella as a colleague who, like most Germans, was direct and to the point: he always said what he meant.

“You can do things wrong for a lifetime”, he told me.

Whenever I see consultants promoting their years of experience, I’m not sure it’s as powerful an asset as many might think.

When you hire a plumber or decorator, it helps to know they have some experience - but beyond a low level, the number really doesn’t matter. Whether they have 7, 10, or 15 years of experience wouldn’t be the decisive factor in who you hire.

The same is more or less true for consultants too.

Past a relatively low level, there is a law of diminishing returns about the experience. Going from two to four years doubles your experience. But going from 18 to 20 only increases your experience by 11%.

You need some experience, absolutely, to get clients. But beyond a relatively low level what you can do with that experience matters far more than how much experience you have.

This raises the real question:

What you can do with all your experience that someone with half of your experience can’t do?

Years of experience is essentially a data point. And like all data points, it should support the narrative you’re trying to tell. It isn’t the narrative itself.

Years of experience is great when you can highlight:

• The unique abilities you’ve acquired that others don’t have. What training have you received, qualifications have you acquired and skills have you developed that someone with less experience simply won’t have?

• The unique knowledge you’ve acquired. Do you have more diverse knowledge as a result of working on different projects in different sectors? Can you specifically highlight the unique knowledge you have as a result of your experience?

• The unique relationships you’ve developed. Do you have relationships which could be useful to other clients? Has your experience given you connections to key people who would be useful to current and future clients?

• The growing list of successes. Do you have a list of successes which reflect your experience? Can you list them by year? etc…

If you can answer these questions, then you can create a narrative supported by your experience.

Instead of stating “I have 20 years of experience working in [sector]”, it’s a lot more effective to say: “In the past 20 years I developed the ability to [skill 1, 2, 3]. I’ve worked in [sector, 1, 2, 3], and/or achieved [success 1, 2, 3, 4 etc..]

Now you can see that the years of experience number is supporting the broader narrative (you are the most qualified person in the room).

You get the idea. It’s the experience which gave you the time to develop all these attributes which are useful to the client. You translate your experience into specific benefits for clients. This is what sets you apart.

If you can’t turn your years of experience into specific benefits to clients, what’s the point of them?