Repackaging Your Skills for Consulting€¦ · Repackaging your skills for consulting by John...

Repackaging Your Skills for Consulting A presentation by John Hedtke [email protected] www.hedtke.com

Repackaging your skills for consulting

by John Hedtke, www.hedtke.com

Speaker Background • John Hedtke has worked in high tech for 30

years and has written books and documentation for many leading software products. John owns and operates Double Tall Consulting, a company that provides writing, consulting, and training services to private and government clients in all fields. A list of clients, projects, and other information can be found at his web site, www.hedtke.com.

• When not otherwise occupied, John lives in Eugene, OR, where he writes magazine articles, plays the banjo, and sings Renaissance and jazz music with several choirs. John is a Fellow of the STC and has served on the STC’s Board.



What this presentation covers • What skills do you have now?

• What kinds of consulting are there?

• What skills does consulting require?

• How do you repackage your skills for consulting?

• How do you find work as a consultant?



What this presentation doesn’t cover • Becoming a ‘consultant’ in the sense of being freelance…

• …but it’s going to be valuable job hunting and interviewing skills even so.

• If you want to learn more about being a freelancer, download this article:

http://www.hedtke.com/consulting/fc.pdf



What Are Your TC Skills? • Analyzing

• Researching

• Synthesizing

• Reporting

• Interviewing

• Estimating

• Writing/Communicating

• Publishing



What Are Your General Skills? • Domain knowledge

• Project management

• General business skills

• Negotiation and risk management

• Spreadsheets

• PowerPoint

• Presentation and sales skills

• Marketing

• Team/department management



What other TC or general skills can you suggest?



Kinds of Consultant • Business analyst

• Efficiency expert

• Disaster recovery consultant

• Documentation consultant

• Implementation consultant

• Process consultant

• Hiring/retention/layoff consultant

• Executive coach

• General consultant

• What other types of consultants can you think of?



What Does a Business Analyst Do? • Identify problems

• Gather information

• Listen to people

• Write problem statements and reports

• Identify potential solutions

• Create CBAs and projections

• Present findings

• Negotiate budgets and deadlines

• (possibly) Manage teams to implement a solution



These are the same skills!



The Skills Are the Same! • Identify problems = Analyzing

• Gather information = Researching

• Listen to people = Interviewing

• Write problem statements and reports = Reporting

• Identify potential solutions = Synthesizing

• Create CBAs and projections = Estimating

• Present findings = Presenting

• Negotiate budgets and deadlines = Negotiating

• Manage teams to implement a solution = Managing



Are There Differences? • You’ll need different sets of domain knowledge… but you always do.

• Different deliverables: white papers, presentations, executive reports, some P&P.

• More graphics work: flowcharts, Venn diagrams, conceptual art, more elaborate page design.

• More sales emphasis: even if it’s just selling your conclusions, you need to present them well.

• More interaction with people, particularly execs.



But they’re still basically the same skills.



Skill Sets for Other Consultant Types • What are the primary skills/tasks for each of these consultants and are there things that you don’t

already have as a TCer?

• Efficiency expert

• Disaster recovery consultant

• Documentation consultant

• Implementation consultant

• Process consultant

• Hiring/retention/layoff consultant

• Executive coach

• General consultant



Skills You Most Likely Need to Transition into Consulting • Domain knowledge

• General business knowledge

• People skills

• Certifications (occasionally)



Above All, Confidence • Consulting is all about confidence.

• Read the books on the reading list for a vocabulary of concepts.



What If You Don’t Have Everything? • Most people think of their skills as a checklist.

• You match your skills against the skills in the job listing.



How Most TCers View Their Skills Suppose there’s a job that lists the following requirements:

• Bachelor's in English or technical writing

• 5-10 years experience

• MS Office 2010

• IT systems knowledge

• Left-nostril glow-in-the-dark inhaler technology



…But Your Skills Don’t Match Bachelor's in English or technical writing

5-10 years experience

MS Office 2010

IT systems knowledge

Left-nostril glow-in-the-dark inhaler technology



What Do You Do Now? • At this point, most people just stop, but they’re thinking about this wrong.

• It’s not a checklist, it’s a circle.



Bachelor’s Degree in TC

Left-nostril glow-in-the-dark inhaler

technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010 Right- nostril

inhalers





technology


5-10 years

experience

MS Office 2010 Right- nostril

inhalers Glow-in-the-

dark technology



Cover as Much Area as You Can • The trick is to cover as much of the circle as you can.

• You want the remainder to be something you can dismiss with a wave.

• In fact, any job documenting new product/software has something nobody’s ever seen before.



Getting Out There! What do you need to do to get out there?

• Figure out if you want to work freelance or captive.

• Build a brand.

• Design your collateral.

• Find work.



Freelance or Captive? You can be a consultant on your own (freelance) or you can work for someone else (captive).

I prefer freelance work for a variety of reasons, but many people like having a structure.

As a captive, you can work for very large consulting firms—KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, many others—or for thousands of smaller companies. Many companies have consulting departments for internal consulting, too.

You’ll find captive jobs like this through normal job-hunting venues.

But let’s take a look at more freelance jobs (and this applies also to building your persona as a consultant for captivity, too)….



Identify Your Brand Magid’s Law! Answer these questions for yourself:

• What’s your specialty that will keep your market coming back for more?

• What do you do that’s fantastic?

• Do you have superpowers?

• What problems do you solve?

You need to claim your niche, the things you do that are fantastic and that will make you worth hiring.



Self-Assessment Tool You can download a very helpful self-assessment tool here:

http://www.hedtke.com/consulting/niche.pdf

This helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses and shows where to bolster your skills.




Build a Value Proposition Build a statement about what you’re going to do, something that’s elevator-speech level that you can rattle off within about 30-45 seconds. This should tell your clients what they can expect from your company. For example:

Double Tall Consulting helps companies so they can produce timely, clear, and informative documentation that maximizes the value of a company’s products and minimizes their customers’

need for product support. We can evaluate and enhance existing documentation departments as well as set up new ones, troubleshoot process problems, and provide a complete range of writing, training,

authoring, and ghostwriting services.



Marketing Collateral • Email signature

• Website

• Blog Posts

• White Papers

• Brochures

• Business Cards

• Resume

• Social Media Sites

Google+

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram



If You Don’t Know Marketing…. • Find someone who does to team up with.

• Learn to do it on your own:

Marketingmo.com

Impactbnd.com

Hubspot.com

• You’ll probably find you know a lot already, but you didn’t know you knew it.

• Bad marketing people are right out of Dilbert.

• Good marketing people are worth their weight in pigeon’s-blood rubies.



How Do Consultants Find Work? Home Office Computing had a survey of successful vs. unsuccessful consultants. (Successful consultants made 2x or more than the unsuccessful consultants.)

SUCCESSFUL consultants got work through:

• Speaking

• Networking

• Referrals

UNSUCCESSFUL consultants got work through:

• Advertising

• Mass-mailings

• Cold calls



Some War Stories There are lots of things you can do to build up your presence.

• Books & articles

• Social media

• Networking

• Professional organizations

• Referrals



Recommended Reading • The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg

• Peopleware (3rd ed.) by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister

• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Dr. Roger von Oech

• Clutter's Last Stand by Don Aslett

• Up the Organization by Robert Townsend

• The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason

• The Time Trap by Alex Mackenzie







Summary • As a TCer, you have a lot of skills.

• These skills are the skills you need more most consulting jobs, packaged a little differently.

• You will need to add domain knowledge, so be ready to learn things quickly.

• Figure out what you do that’s fantastic and build on that.

• Read the books I recommended.

• Be confident and, if not, fake it. (That’s just as good.)



Thank you!

John Hedtke Double Tall Consulting 2171 Kingfisher Way Eugene, OR USA 97401 541-685-5000 [email protected] Feel free to email or write if you have questions. (Please use the name of this seminar as the subject so I can get to it quickly.)

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