This role is extremely demanding and you will be overworked and undervalued. Every consultant puts in 50-70 hour weeks in order to meet ridiculously hard revenue targets. Leadership only cares about how much money each individual brings in and you will need to sacrifice personal time to make it happen. This is the expectation for all consultants and the ‘bare minimum’ is exhausting.
There is a strong disconnect between the interview process and the actual department / role. HR will claim that there are many opportunities in SMAR but actually those are not available for internal transfers. I have heard of four people getting rejected from internal roles in the last month. Another benefit HR will sell you on is unlimited sick time which does not really apply for consulting since when you are out you will need to make up the billable time elsewhere (aka working weekends). The salary for this job is 80-90k as a base - don’t let HR tell you otherwise as some outlier consultants are making in the 60-70s. Another HR claim is that there are consulting career paths, but those are not clear with no tangible path forward. Promotions are rewarded to favorites only and the department is a boys club (hence why most managers and all of sr leadership + are males).
Consulting’s internal processes are disconnected because no one actually has time to do anything strategic since that is non-billable - unless you want to use your own personal time for it. This Consultant role has a VERY high attrition rate because of being overworked, undervalued, and the stress.
The projects you will run are extremely difficult because of the paradox between what sales sold, customer expectations, hours the customer purchased, and manager/business expectations. This takes up a great deal of energy, time, and emotional capacity.
As a project manager, you will need to have a strong aggressive character otherwise, you will not succeed in this role. You will be constantly communicating with customers about scope boundaries which results in consistently stressful escalations because of sales over-promising. It gets very draining.
