IT Jobs| What does a Technology Consultant do?

IT jobs: Find out what is the role of a Technology Consultant. Read and analyse if you have the right skillset to become one!

By Ruchira Sanyal -

April 4, 2017

5677

A consultant is a professional who renders her / his expert advice and is paid for the services by clients. Depending on the domain to which the advice caters, there are different kinds of consultants – management consultants, who advise organisations on how to improve their performance by looking at the business as a whole; human resource consultants, whose area of expertise is human resources etc. Similarly, technology consultants help organisations fulfil their business objectives using technology. Their area of expertise could be information systems design, software programming and development, information business strategies, system analysis etc.

Job Role & Responsibilities

Consultants are generally brought in by the upper management as the management thinks there is a need for expert advice on their technology services. A technology consultant should be able to perform the following tasks:

Meet up with the clients, understand their objective and estimate the scope of the problem.
Able to work their way through various departments of the organisation to understand how technology affects various sections of employees. This helps them make recommendations later.
Prepare and present technology solutions to clients.
Able to withstand a large amount of travel as they may be required to work at the client site to better understand the technology.
Constantly upgrade their technology skills to stay up to date and present the best possible solutions to clients.

Competencies & Skills Required

Consultants in general, should have strong analytical skills and good conceptual thinking to be able to understand the objective of their assignment, to get to the root cause of the issue at hand and to make suitable recommendations. They also need to have strong communication & presentation skills as mostly, their audience is the upper management. In addition to this, technology consultants should be specialists in one or more fields of technology.

Assessments for the ‘Right’ Technology Consultant

The following table illustrates how different competencies & skills required for the role map to assessments:

Technology Consultant Profile	AMCAT Mapping
Analytical Skills	Logical Ability: High
Communication Skills	SVAR (spoken English) : High AMCAT English: High
Technology expertise	Domain Module (C/ C++/ SQL/ JAVA) : High
Planning and Execution	Logical Ability: Mid Conscientiousness: Mid to High
Ability to work under pressure	Emotional Stability: Mid to High
Result Orientation	Conscientiousness: Mid to High