Business consulting can be a satisfying and robust career, providing variety, a skill set that is in constant demand, and clear evidence of accomplishment. However, becoming a successful business consultant takes some thought and preparation. A prospective business consultant must gain multiple skills, relevant experience, and a solid understanding of business operations and conditions. Fortunately, individuals interested in this career can begin with smaller steps, building their knowledge and plans over time and gaining experience and other qualifications while employed.
Getting Started
To begin a career in business consulting, start by researching this career. Informational articles like this one, online discussions, and video presentations and interviews are all good starting sources but will vary in quality. More detailed information comes from books written by experts, curricula at career training centers, career counselors, and interviews with working business consultants. Libraries, colleges, and non-profit business incubators will sometimes host information sessions, workshops, and free classes on consulting careers, ideally taught or informed by an experienced consultant.
Professional training programs are another way to learn more about consulting. Although a paid training program can be a significant expenditure of time and money, such courses provide a thorough introduction to business operations and a consultant’s work. Professional training programs are usually taught by experienced experts who can share their insights and advice, and many programs include additional mentoring and career guidance that can jump-start a prospective consultant’s career. Ideal programs for beginning students will have few or no prerequisites, and although no single course can completely prepare a consultant to start work, a good introduction can help them build a valid career plan. Initial training might direct a candidate to additional courses, useful work experience, or a formal degree program that will advance their career goals.
Do I Need a Degree to Become a Business Consultant?
Clients expect a consultant to be a knowledgeable resource, not only well-versed in business operations but also skilled in observation, analysis, and communications. However, these abilities do not have to be gained through formal education or proven with a specific degree. A degree program is just one way to build and prove ability. Other routes include individual study, training programs, certifications, and work experience.
A degree can certainly help to reassure clients or employers that a consultant has studied appropriate subjects and trained useful skills. In particular, a degree from a general business administration course or a related field like project management can provide a significant academic background in business operations. A Masters in Business Administration (MBA) confirms extensive knowledge in this area. However, consultants can gain comparable business knowledge while working as an executive, administrator, or manager in a business environment. Successfully starting and growing a small business also teaches lessons that can be conveyed later as a consultant. When discussing your credentials with a potential client or employer, relevant work experience is more impressive than any degree.
Before working, some background study may be necessary, but here again, options exist outside of formal degree programs. For example, business training is available through textbooks, websites, and video tutorials. Professional training programs from non-college schools are even better than self-guided lessons. They provide most of the same information faster and for a lower cost than a degree, plus they include portfolio-building projects, career guidance, and support services to get novices started in their first job. Certificates provided by training schools may not have the reputation of a formal degree, but they do prove the completion of a valid course of study.
Studying other related subjects can also demonstrate useful knowledge and skills. For example, a business consultant specializing in software development will benefit from a degree program in computer science, software engineering, or a related discipline like information technology. Once again, consultants can gain these abilities through other routes, including working as a software developer, self-guided study, or a training program.
To be successful, consultants also need various other skills, including communication, data analysis, resource management, and marketing. While a college student might pursue a minor in business consulting, major degree programs for this specific career are rare. Some of a consultant’s necessary skills can be gained on the job, especially for novices climbing through a consulting firm. However, some starting ability is necessary to qualify for such jobs, and a freelance consultant needs adequate expertise right away to serve clients on their own. Here, non-college training programs have the most to offer. Students can take individual courses on skills like public speaking and data analysis, and some training providers do offer specific courses on business consulting, explaining the career and teaching its necessary subskills.
Finally, another way to prepare for a consulting career and demonstrate one’s abilities is an official consulting certification. Certifications are awarded by national or international organizations based on a candidate’s proven qualifications, which include education, work experience, and examinations. Examples of common certifications for business consultants include Certified Management Consultant (CMC), Project Management Professional (PMP), and Talent Optimization Consultant (TOC). These certifications often include training programs to help candidates prepare, programs that teach them some subjects directly and show them what more they need to learn in other areas. Successfully completing a certification provides as much proof of one’s competence as a degree, if not more, due to its specific requirements.
Internships
Nearly every large consulting firm offers internship opportunities. Internship programs may run for a few days or weeks, over a summer, or as long as a year. Thousands of business consulting internships are available each year, though the majority of these opportunities are for undergraduate or Master’s program students studying business or a closely related major. Internships introduce students to consulting, help them shape their academic goals, build their early skills, and provide them with useful experience. The best internships allow students to contribute to client projects, creating examples of their work for their portfolios. In return, host businesses get an introduction to potential future employees, an opportunity to shape their skills and careers, and extra workers.
Consulting internships are competitive, usually requiring an application, and it helps if candidates have already completed some related coursework. However, those interested in a consulting career can also benefit from other kinds of internships in consulting-related fields like administration, communication, or finance or a specialty field like law, engineering, or information technology. Again, having started a degree program or taken several training courses in relevant areas will improve a student’s likelihood of selection for an internship; this preparation will also improve the value of an internship by giving the student more skills to use for their host employer.
Entry-Level Business Consultant Jobs
Across the United States, the average salary for an Entry-Level Business Consultant averages around $77,000 per year. Within a consulting firm, an Entry-Level or Junior Business Consultant typically handles routine tasks like client interviews, research, data analysis, and reporting. New hires learn from more senior consultants, gradually assuming more responsibilities as they add new skills. An entry-level hire is expected to continue their formal studies, as well.
Potential starting positions for business consulting work are more numerous and varied than is suggested by the title Business Consultant alone. Entry-level candidates with sufficient data analysis training may be hired as Analysts, instead, putting a greater focus on data collection and interpretation tasks. Depending on a candidate’s specific skillset, other potential entry-level positions include Management Consultant, Management Trainee, Marketing Consultant, Customer Service Consultant, Business Analyst, Social Media Specialist, and Environmental Analyst. Within businesses other than consulting firms, such entry positions may report directly to administrators or executives in areas like Human Resources, Information Technology, or Operations, rather than to a senior consultant. For these positions, an entry-level consultant is hired to provide specific expertise by teaching or advising in that area. Interestingly, nearly half of all beginning Business Consultants work in the public sector rather than for private firms. Public sector consulting jobs include Business Advisors at small business incubators and Instructors at business schools.
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Mid-Level Business Consultant Jobs
After some time working for a firm as an entry-level Business Consultant or Analyst, a more experienced worker may be promoted to Associate Consultant. Such promotion is more likely if the consultant has gained a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree. Associate Consultants work more closely with Senior Consultants, often providing guidance and services directly to clients. They may still perform data collection, analysis, and reporting duties but are trusted with larger, more complex projects. The average salary for Associate Consultants in the United States rises to $83,000 per year.
Again, as for entry-level positions, many other titles can apply to mid-level consulting jobs, especially when a worker progresses from being a member of a team to being its head or manager. A Management Trainee or Management Consultant could be promoted to a Management Associate or Project Manager. A Marketing Consultant could progress to Engagement Manager, responsible for multiple marketing campaigns. A Technical Advisor could become a Technical Expert, especially if they diversify their skills.
Senior Business Consultant Jobs
A business consultant who has gained a deep, proven understanding of business operations, multiple related skills such as financial analysis, teaching, and project management, and the ability to coordinate and train junior consultants and analysts may be promoted further, becoming a Senior Associate Consultant, Senior Consultant, or even Partner at a consulting firm. These titles may also be claimed by consultants who expand a smaller consulting firm — possibly one they created themselves — into a larger company. A Senior Consultant in the United States earns about $113,000 per year, on average.
A senior employee at a consulting firm might become a Project Leader, instead, directing an entire consulting project for a single, large client or coordinating the activities of multiple teams within their firm. A Senior Manager within a consulting firm has similar high-level responsibilities, often communicating directly with the owners of client businesses to promote the firm’s services, create improvement plans, and delegate projects to Project Leaders and Senior Consultants.
Outside of consulting firms, though, only the largest companies have enough internal consultants to need a senior-level employee overseeing multiple consulting groups.
Another Path: Freelancing
About 20% to 30% of business consultants are self-employed, choosing the freedom and variety of freelance work over the slower, more limited progress of a corporate job. Freelance business consultants can shape their own workload and quickly gain varied experience. However, a new self-employed business consultant must be prepared to handle all aspects of this trade: finding clients, performing investigations, gathering and analyzing data, and guiding and teaching clients. Freelance consultants’ need to keep a steady clientele means that they must develop their sales skills quickly and spend a portion of their time marketing. Thus, a new freelance business consultant needs more training and experience than a Junior Consultant at a firm. They must also continue to learn and expand their skills, often without a supervising mentor.
In addition to analysis and advice, freelance business consultants may provide direct services to their clients. Their service offerings usually depend on their specialties and might include securing investors, hiring workers, building a computing network, or designing an operational structure for a client. These added services may result in a heavier daily workload, but for a self-employed consultant, more work means more pay, and more specialized, in-demand work means even higher fees. Frequently, self-employed consultants have trained or worked in another professional area first, then improve their consulting skills while serving clients.
How Do I Find A Business Consultant Job?
To qualify for work as a business consultant, a candidate must first know how a successful business starts and operates. They must also have strong communication, analysis, and problem-solving skills to provide clients with appropriate advice and interventions. Prepared with these skills, a potential business consultant should create a promotional plan listing their credentials, describing the services they can offer, and explaining the value of those services. Ideally, they should create a portfolio including examples of past work. Research into the consulting field can help to tailor a candidate’s job pitch, identify what services are in high demand, and locate emerging opportunities for consulting. Depending on a consultant’s background and employment goal, their self-promotion might take the form of a resume or a business plan. Establishing one’s credentials as a business expert through training, certification, service, and references also helps to build interest and potential clientele. Finally, the candidate must contact potential employers and present their pitch, convincing an employer to hire them either on a specific contracted basis or as a direct employee.
Business Expertise
A consultant’s business knowledge need not be total or universal. This is especially true for consultants who focus their practice on certain aspects of business operations or specific industries. Still, consultants should understand fundamental principles like business planning, financing, staffing, workflow, growth, and troubleshooting. This knowledge can come from study, work experience, mentored training, or a combination of all three. A consultant can (and should) expand their knowledge further while working, but they need some basic competence to start. Academic degrees are valuable, but professional certificates and certifications — both consulting-specific credentials and specialty areas like management, security, or finance — can also verify a candidate’s competence to potential employers.
Other Skills: Communication, Analysis, and Problem-Solving
A prospective consultant should be able to communicate well in multiple settings, gather and analyze information, and identify and solve client problems. These abilities are necessary to examine a client’s business in detail, determine its needs, and apply knowledge to create improvements. Again, a consultant can improve these skills on the job, but training and practice with public speaking, interviewing, investigation, data analysis, and creative problem-solving will make a candidate more qualified to start work as a business consultant.
Career Planning
A business consultant’s preferred type of employment is often guided by their studies, their experience, the services they can provide, and the industries they plan to work for. Many consultants are self-employed, contracting with client businesses to provide one or more services. Others work for consulting firms, companies that employ multiple consultants and act as an interface between those consultants and their clients. A few consultants work directly for corporations, either hired for a limited term to complete a specific task or employed flexibly over a longer period, identifying problems as they arise and improving processes wherever possible. However, these internal positions are rarely entry-level, except for analysts and trainers in the largest corporations, and usually require an established reputation as a skilled consultant.
Each option has benefits and limitations, but a new consultant may not have as many options for their first job. Some start as freelancers to gain enough experience and references to secure a more consistent and well-paying position. Some accept entry-level positions with a consulting firm but are initially limited to routine work like interviewing, data analysis, or reporting. This labor can teach useful skills and might be preferable to the complexities and stresses of self-employment but does not grant as much diverse experience or greatly increase one’s professional reputation. Some potential consultants must initially work in other areas, such as human resources or administration, to build experience before launching their consulting career.
Self-Employment
If planning to work as a freelancer, a business consultant will need:
- a comprehensive business plan, detailing the clients they are seeking, the services they can offer, their preferred employment model, and their pricing structure
- a record of their previous work, either a portfolio describing the improvements they generated for clients or, at a minimum, samples of their expertise such as live presentations, articles, or classes they’ve taught
- a marketing plan, including statements explaining the nature and value of their work, methods to find and approach potential clients, and an advertising budget
- a support network, including professional organizations that provide training, guidance, and client contacts, and associations of fellow consultants and business owners
Consulting Firms
Business consultants seeking a position with a consulting firm should:
- create a portfolio of their previous work, including improvements created for clients, positive references, and/or samples of their expertise like presentations or articles
- prepare a resume listing their education, work experience, and other credentials
- research potential employers, their needs, and their expectations for candidates
- prepare for interviews by researching likely questions and preparing answers
- anticipate starting in subordinate roles handling routine tasks like interviews, data collection, analysis, and reporting for more senior consultants
Learn the Skills to Become a Business Consultant at Noble Desktop
Business courses at Noble Desktop can teach you most of the skills needed to start working as a business consultant, including general business skills, soft skills used in consulting, and specialized skills often sought by clients. These courses span short classes of one or two sessions, bootcamps of varying lengths, and comprehensive professional training programs. Noble Desktop’s classes are available both online and in person in New York City. All classes include live instruction, supplemental reference materials, a digital certificate of completion, and the option to retake the class for free for up to one year. Students can also view recordings after each class session and for up to one month later.
Business Skills
Noble Desktop’s “MBA” Business Certificate course covers a full range of professional business skills, including useful tools and information on project management, leadership, finance, marketing, data analysis, generative AI, hiring, and legal concerns. While not a full MBA degree program, this certificate course was developed by experienced professionals to cover the core elements of a business education. In addition, this class’ certificate is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The primary course runs for about five weeks, including both live class sessions and study projects. In addition to reinforcing class lessons, these projects will generate work samples for a starting portfolio. In addition to the primary course, students can select up to 60 hours of elective classes including programming languages, business software, financial tools, and digital marketing. The course also includes eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions allowing students to work directly with a mentor to address individual goals, review difficult lessons, improve their portfolios and resumes, and refine their career plans.
Included within the “MBA” Business Certificate but also available as a separate course, Noble Desktop’s Project Management Bootcamp is an accelerated program teaching project management methods, tools, and strategies. The program is primarily designed to prepare students for a career in project management but is equally valuable for business consultants. This course is taught in two class sessions, Project Management Level I and Project Management Level II. The first session addresses the theory, practice, subskills, and commonly used tools of project management. The second class further details the individual phases of a project; covers financial, resource, and risk management; and introduces students to the Agile Project Management methodology and several of its implementations, or “frameworks”.
Leadership, Management, and Public Speaking
Although often described as ‘soft skills,’ leadership, communication, and management can be improved through study and provide concrete benefits. Business consultants use leadership and management techniques not only when directing clients’ employees but also whenever they advise, teach, and motivate clients or when devising organizational structures. Noble Desktop’s Applied Leadership & Management Skills is a two-session class that first teaches the fundamental elements of leadership, communication, and management, then applies these lessons to specific challenges like setting and meeting goals, managing workplace conflict, setting and meeting a schedule, and creative problem-solving. Another class, Intro to Public Speaking, is a shorter, one-session class that focuses more specifically on group communication skills and improves students’ confidence, clarity, and persuasiveness. These abilities are particularly valuable to consultants when teaching skills, delivering advice, or presenting research to clients. The class also includes a section on skillful, effective use of Microsoft PowerPoint for presentations.
Data Analytics
Data analytics is the ability to gather information, organize it, process it to obtain accurate and informative conclusions, and present these findings in clear, persuasive forms. Consultants regularly use data analysis to investigate and describe their clients’ operations, as a prelude to specific recommendations and interventions and as a way to track the effects of their changes. Most entry-level positions with consulting firms involve data analysis, and a consultant with significant data analytic ability is a stronger candidate for employment.
Noble Desktop offers multiple types of data analytics training. Their Data Analytics Certificate is their most general and comprehensive program. This certificate program can be completed in under two months on a full-time schedule but offers several alternate scheduling options if needed. The course covers eight units of instruction, starting with a short course on Microsoft Excel to give students a commonly used tool for data collection, organization, analysis, and visualization. The course then covers data analytics in more depth, addressing its foundational concepts, utility for decision-making, and applications in business. Subsequent units teach specific coding and visualization tools, including Python (a general-purpose programming language), SQL (a programming language specialized for data collection and management), and Tableau (a popular data visualization program). The course also addresses machine learning algorithms and their interactions with data analysis. This certificate course includes eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions and a New York State licensed certificate of completion.
For a shorter and more focused course, Noble Desktop’s Business Analyst Certificate covers several data analysis tools used in business operations. This certificate program takes students from introductory lessons to advanced skills with Microsoft Excel, SQL, Tableau, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Each application’s section is the equivalent of an individual bootcamp, including fundamental skills training, specific methods used for data analysis and/or reporting, and advanced techniques to add more utility and improve efficiency. This course lasts about six weeks on a full-time schedule, with part-time scheduling also available. Completing this course awards students with a New York State licensed certificate.
Financial analysis is one of the most common types of data analysis for businesses and an asset for any business consultant. Noble Desktop’s Financial Modeling Bootcamp is an intensive, three-session course that uses Excel to demonstrate representations, analyses, and concepts useful to understand any company’s finances. Participants are expected to already have good fluency and working experience with Excel. Alternatively, the Financial Analyst Training Program adds two preliminary classes on Excel and its use in data analysis and then presents the same material as the Financial Modeling Bootcamp.
Marketing
Marketing is another necessity for businesses and a valuable skill for a business consultant. Finding interested customers, developing an appealing product, managing pricing and sales, creating interest and need, and confirming and retaining buyers all require trained strategy. Noble Desktop’s Marketing Strategy class teaches the fundamental concepts of marketing and addresses specific techniques to create, implement, and manage a marketing strategy. The class’ two sessions also include time to practice these methods in guided projects.
Two additional classes address modern, online marketing methods in more depth. The Digital Marketing Certificate program is a New York State-licensed certificate course that covers a complete range of digital marketing methods and considerations, from website creation and web advertising to email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media sites and campaigns. Students learn not only how to establish an appealing online presence but also how to manage online activity to excite customers, hold their interest, and avoid mistakes. This course can be completed in about one month on a full-time schedule. A shorter course, but also a State-licensed certificate, the Social Media Marketing Certificate program is a subset of the Digital Marketing Certificate program that focuses more specifically on social media use and marketing strategies.