Tech consulting, in a nutshell, is a field where experts provide advice and services to businesses about how to best use technology to achieve their goals.
To get a clearer idea, let's imagine a fictional company, "Green Grocers", a mid-sized chain of grocery stores. They've been successful in their local market but have struggled to streamline their inventory management. For instance, they've been facing challenges with tracking inventory levels accurately across stores, leading to overstocking some items and running out of others.
While Green Grocers could try to build their own inventory system internally, it's a huge leap for a grocery chain!
This is where tech consultants come into the picture! They've got the skills and experience to get things right from the get-go, letting Green Grocers keep their focus on fresh produce and happy customers.
For the most part, tech consultants help companies set up complicated pieces of software (known as "enterprise software") to best fit their needs. You can think of them as the bridge between enterprise software and a business's specific needs.
Enterprise software is a type of computer software that's designed for the complexity and size of large businesses or "enterprises." Businesses use enterprise software to deal with their everyday activities. It's like a toolbox full of different tools for things like:
In a nutshell, enterprise software is like the digital backbone that keeps everything running smoothly, efficiently, and in an organized way.
Enterprise software becomes the "single source of truth" that the company can refer back to. When you store everything in Excel, for instance, it's easier for people to modify the formulas that are used to calculate things. With enterprise software, the system is locked. You can't change the formulas unless the system is unlocked.
Also if you use Excel, it's harder to trace numbers to see where they came from. In Workday, for instance, you can right-click to see the formula and how the numbers were derived.
Enterprise software can take two forms.
Why do companies need tech consultants to come in and set up software for them? Here are a few reasons why.
#1 Complexity & customization
Installing enterprise software isn't like installing an app on your phone. These systems need to integrate with a company's existing processes and systems, which are usually quite intricate.
Plus, each business is unique, with its own set of needs and challenges. Enterprise software often requires customization to fit a company's specific requirements. Tech consultants are skilled in tweaking and tailoring these systems to align with specific workflows, business processes, and company objectives.
When a client decides to purchase software, it's a shell. Workday sells a license to them which says something like "For $5 million, I'll grant you 10 users a year." Clients will also pay a monthly subscription fee. But it's an empty shell.
As consultants, we go in to understand what the client needs and configure it to meet all of them – from how they procure (buy things) from suppliers to how they make budgets and forecast future growth.
#2 Change management
Introducing a new enterprise system can be quite disruptive for employees who are used to previous systems. Tech consultants also help manage this transition by training staff, providing support as they adapt to the new system, and ensuring minimal disruption to the business during the transition.
95% of the time, users hate the new system. Just imagine you've been working at a company for 10 years. You're going to be used to doing things a certain way and needing to learn a whole new system will just be extra work.
That's where change management comes in. Sometimes clients hire a separate team of change management consultants who'll try to convince users that the new system benefits them.
I've only worked with change management consultants twice though. Most of the time, we handle the change management ourselves. As tech consultants, you're already building a good relationship with your clients as you work with them, which will soften the impact of the change.
#3 Ongoing support & optimization
After the software is up and running, it needs to be maintained and updated. Tech consultants provide ongoing support, helping to resolve any issues that arise and making adjustments as the business evolves and grows.
After the software goes live, there's usually a support period of 1-2 months. During this time, if htey discover issues, we'll fix it. After the support period ends, they can either fix problems themselves or sign a contract with the firm which they can activate on an ad hoc basis when they need help.
This is called "AMS" or "application management services" and most of the time, this work isn't done by US-based consultants. There will be a team in, say, India who'll take care of the support work.
In sum, enterprise software is not cheap, so tech consultants ensure that the investment a company makes translates into real benefits.
Most of your day-to-day as an entry-level tech consultant will be getting trained and helping out with the "backend" work of configuring software for clients.
Let's take the enterprise software Workday for example. If a new hire is placed in a practice that helps clients set up Workday, they'll first need to get certified in Workday first. So we'd put them through a week of training, and they'd take a test. Once they're certified in, say, the supply chain side of Workday, we'd then train them to configure Workday's Accounts Payable side, Procure-to-Pay, and so on and so forth.
Most of the time, the analyst would be tied with a senior who would teach them. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe after they help out with one project, they might have a break, then we get them certified in Business Assets or Tax to help them figure out what they're interested in.
You usually won't interact directly with clients.
When you join as an intern or analyst, you usually don't have the expertise to advise clients and we don't want to give clients the impression that we don't know our stuff.
Compared to junior consultants in other practices, your work will consist of a lot fewer PowerPoint slides.
If you're a strategy consultant, your Powerpoint slides need to look beautiful, because you use it to convince a client to buy your idea. As a tech consultant, our slides don't need to be fancy. Clients have already bought a system and want our help configuring it.
So our slides will be more basic and cover things like the pain points their employees mentioned, our recommendations on what parts of a software they should use, aspects of the software we want their employees to help us test, and training information.
Like consultants in other practices, you'll be expected to help out with other tasks when you have extra time – like when you're in between projects.
You generally want to maintain a utilization rate of 80-85% – and only project work counts as "utilization." If your utilization rate falls under your peers, you'll need to explain yourself.
You don't want the firm to think you're not doing anything with the rest of your time, so you either take on more training or help out with things around the firm. For instance, I've participated in four rounds of recruiting and also helped out at an onboarding, which meant going to Disneyland with new hires.
Or you might help out with business development, which is helping the firm get more clients. Let's say my director wants to sell a project to JP Morgan. I have to help out with PowerPoint slides, do a mockup of the system that we can showcase to the client, and draft a Statement of Work (SOW) – things like that.
Whether you need to code would depend on the software you specialize in. Some software, like SAP, for example, would require more coding skills, while others won't.
If you're working on SAP, you do need to code. I've done SAP EPM implementations before and in order to do some calculations, I had to use basic SQL. If you're implementing SAP's Business Warehouse, you'll need to use a different set of coding knowledge to code what your clients need.
Whereas for Workday you don't need to code. You just need to understand the logic behind it. You'll still need some minimal SQL coding, depending on how complicated the client's needs.
In any case, being a computer science graduate isn't a surefire way to get into tech consulting.
I started out in a boutique consulting firm, and there were six of us and only one CS graduate. Everyone else was accounting, economics, etc – people who could read and understand financial statements.
If you are a computer science grad with no knowledge of financial statements, you might be able to work on the SAP side, specializing in business warehousing. But you may not be suitable for the business side (e.g. ERP or EPM). Because it would not be easy for me to teach you financial or accounting knowledge – like how to read clients' balance sheets, income and cashflow statements. Tech skills is something I can train you in.
The best parts of tech consulting seem to be the travel and clients.
I enjoy face time with clients. In tech consulting, I like that we're cross-industry so we get to interact with clients from all walks of life. You get to interact with them, know them a bit better. Even as an analyst, you'll work at the client's place so you'll get to know them even if you're not directly advising them.
I also enjoy getting to travel, getting to see different states, and having fun along the way. Let's just say clients are really nice to us.
Since COVID, there's been less travel and less face time with clients though. On the bright side, we've started being able to work from home more, which I like as well.
Favorite parts: Travel to client sites, and exploring a new area. Learning about our client's Business as Usual - Deloitte had some really cool clients while I was there! Also, getting the opportunity for a stretch role and working side by side with mid-career professionals.
– Former tech consultant @ Deloitte
Consultants' least favorite parts of their work ranged from the hours to getting stuck on dead-end projects.
What I really don't like is the hours – they can be dreadfully long. If a system is set to go live on Jan 1st, that means my Christmas and New Years holidays are gone. When the system goes live, I can't take leave. I also don't like how the hours get crazy.
Least favorite: When you find out duplicate energy was exerted to tackle the same problem - you will be surprised how often this happens on big projects with hundreds of people.
– Former tech consultant @ Deloitte
I think a lot of times consulting is about luck ... and no matter ... what you're trying to do sometimes, you're just stuck ...
So this was actually in 2021 ... At this point, I've been at Accenture for about three years, and I've done a lot of Workday Financial software implementations ... but this was the first time where I did something called "AMS support" which is post-production support – like 2-3 years after they've already gone live in the software that you're trying to support, these are typically incidences that they get like bugs or issues that come up ... And the one I particularly had was with a health insurance company ...
I was stuck on the support and one big reason why I left Accenture is because the type of work that I had on this project didn't show or support "next level work." ... That was a big issue for me, because how are they going to see what exactly I'm doing to be able to say that you're ready for the next level? ...
It didn't really show the kind of work that I wanted to show to get promoted. And for that reason, I didn't get promoted in the next round ... and I honestly was really annoyed because the work I did was ... really hard ... in some cases even more difficult than implementation.
In terms of the hours, tech consulting is definitely not a 9-to-5 job.
A typical day can stretch 12-13 hours since you might have three projects at the same time and you get roped into sales (business development) work. So my utilization is already 150% but I still have to take on additional sales work. If you reject someone for sales work once, they may not ask you for your help again, so there is that pressure.
However, tech consulting is a flexible role with lots of potential to work remotely.
Before COVID, we used to need to go out to client sites a lot. Since COVID, clients no longer want us there. And it's great for firms, since each time we travel, they have to spend a lot on hotels, meals, per diem, (daily allowances), on top of travel expenses.
So now we can work quite flexibly and even work outside the US unless a client specifically doesn't allow it. For example, I had a banking client which issued us a separate laptop for work but they refused to let us bring that laptop out of the US. Besides that, most other industries are pretty flexible and let us work remotely.
I prefer hybrid. The PwC office, I don't have to go in unless there is an event happening, but I don't really go in.
We work from home primarily for technology consultants. And that's where we take their data, we try to convert it, put it into the system, and then run through a lot of quality assurance, and then ... typically leading up to the go-live, that's actually when we're back on-site.
So we are not like what most management consultants do where they're on-site all the time. We're actually either mostly working from home or we go to our home office – in this case mine is New York.
Your work will be even more flexible if you work on the technical side of tech consulting – for example, as a software developer.
Technical consultants – let's say for instance my boyfriend has never been on-site and he's been at Accenture for about 1.5 years. And I know people that have never been on-site for their entire career – sometimes they do if there's a fire to put out but most of the time they're only there as needed.
The most straightforward exit is joining a client's company and helping them manage their enterprise software as an in-house expert.
As a tech consultant, you gain backend knowledge (how to configure the system) and industry knowledge (how businesses do certain things, like calculating certain numbers for their finances). This allows you to give recommendations like "Based on industry standards, you might want to calculate this number like this."
So you can become a "Superuser" at a client company. Usually a client will have a couple of their employees train to become "Superusers" or internal experts in the software they subscribe to. So you can be hired in-house to be a "Super admin" to take care of the system. Titles include "Finance Administrator," "Finance Manager," "Systems Administrator."
Besides client companies, you can also join other companies as their in-house enterprise software expert or help them out as an independent consultant.
I spoke to a lot of people who left Accenture ... and it was a whole spectrum of people who left the Workday ecosystem to do something completely different or people who stayed in the Workday ecosystem on the client side or ... at a different company ... . And some people even went into independent consulting.
You can also move into roles that make use of your skillset. For example, if you managed any projects, you can use those skills to move into project manager roles. Just make that clear on your resume!
I changed my LinkedIn a little bit. I removed almost everything related to Workday in my description ... I also tried to make it less Workday and make it more generalized jargon. For example, I changed "Workday methodology" to "Agile" since Workday methodology is technically a form of Agile.
There are a ton of different exit options, depending on: what you want to do, how you can sell yourself to prospective employer, who you worked on projects for at Deloitte, and what you did on said projects.
A lot of rotational program recruiters reached out to me for a good bit around month 8 on the job on behalf of PE Portcos (private equity portfolio companies) and the like.
Common exits around and before the 2-year mark are roles like "Internal Strategy Associate," which are common at many F500s (essentially, these companies know how Big 4 services work, as they've utilized the firms in the past for many different reasons, so they have in-housed some of the roles that they would have to pay a Deloitte or Accenture hundreds of dollars an hour for.)
Many F500s even have their own internal consulting arms, they just often aren't as robust when it comes to software delivery, hence their need for Big4 transformation services.
– Former tech consultant @ Deloitte
At Deloitte, I trained a junior who joined SAP. He graduated in business administration, had no technical knowledge and no coding. So he went to the ERP side and didn't like it. A few months after I left, he left too. He joined a consulting firm but went for strategy, took a paycut and went from an analyst role to another analyst role. In other words, he didn't get a promotion, so basically his 1+ year of work at Deloitte was discounted.
Moving from tech to strategy is a mismatch. Tech is easier than strategy. It might seem complicated but once you get the hang of the software, you can do it with your eyes closed. If you keep doing Workday Tax modules or Workday Procure-to-Pay modules, after one project for six months, you'll know how to do it super well. Then all this knowledge about how you set up things is transferrable across modules.
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