Food for thought: The consultants' survival kit

A first move into consultancy can be a culture shock: new entrants are often unnerved by the lack of structure and support in an environment where everyone else appears to be far too busy with their own tasks to pay any attention to the "new bug".

"Consultancy is not a particularly nurturing environment," says Calvert Markham. "Despite the efforts of many firms, new people often feel left alone, not knowing who they should turn to or who they need to learn things from."

Culture shock

The life of a consultant is also very fragmented. On the one hand much of it is spent on client sites - where you may spend more time with client staff than with your own colleagues - yet at the same there is the feeling that you may have taken on a 24-by-7 commitment to an organisation in which the rules for survival are far from clear.

Showing you care

Making training available to people early in their consultancy careers is not just a means of equipping them with consultancy skills (although this is important - many consultancies act as if they are innate!). It must also equip them with the skills to survive and grow in a consultancy practice. And training per se can also act as a powerful statement of the firm's commitment to them as individuals.

Manage your career

In this context training is not simply a matter of acquiring operational abilities but "skills to learn" recognising early on that their personal development will be largely their own responsibility.

"Many firms have now set up mentoring and coaching schemes. Unfortunately, the reality is that not all of them work in practice as well as they should. New consultants have therefore to manage their own development actively. No-one is going to as interested in their careers as they are themselves," says Markham . "Each consultant needs to ask themselves, what do I have to do to manage my career to make it successful?"

In response to this demand Elevation Learning has been running courses which equip consultants with the life-skills they need to take charge of their own working lives and future careers.

We no longer expect consultants to pick up client-facing, technical or project management skills on the job, so perhaps its time to stop putting valuable staff through the school of hard knocks when it comes to managing themselves. As one Elevation Learning client put it, "I want my consultants to learn the things I knew after five years that I wish I'd known after six months.