Consulting firms come in all shapes and sizes—they can range from just a few people to a company with hundreds of employees. They also work in various industries: some consulting firms provide services to private companies ranging from healthcare to energy, whereas some work on government contracts.
There are two main types of consulting work. Technical consulting is a little bit more like research and tends to be more along the lines of helping companies develop products or analysis pipelines. On the other hand, management consulting deals more with business issues and strategy. The exact type of challenges you tackle as a consultant will vary from client to client.
There are numerous sizes of private consulting firms, ranging from a few people to hundreds. These firms work with companies of all types and sizes. Major firms often directly recruit PhDs from universities.
However, many individuals choose to stitch together a career by working as a freelance consultant. These folks get contracts from companies to work on specific projects with a deliverable in mind. For example, a company might need someone to analyze data that they collected and hire a freelance consultant to do so. If you’d like to go into freelance consulting, it’s important to start building your network as soon as possible. You can work through whatever contacts you have to find out what people or companies need, whether it’s writing, project design, or data analysis. As a freelance consultant, you’ll also need to build confidence to negotiate contracts and deal with rejection.
Most of the U.S. government work isn’t done by U.S. government employees—it’s done by contractors. And the even more bizarre thing about government contracts is that essentially anyone can compete for them. They’re all posted on a website (Contract Opportunities, https://beta.sam.gov), where anyone can submit a proposal to address one of their opportunities.
Some of these opportunities are directly related to neuroscience. For instance, at the time of writing, the National Institutes of Health was looking for someone to design and build a microscope that can image cells in a moving mouse. The National Institute on Drug Abuse also recently awarded $18,000 to a company to build an amplifier to support dual-recordings in the retina.
However, the bulk of federal opportunities are in engineering (physical and digital) or construction. As you’ll see in chapter 25, Kachi Odoememe was hired by a consulting firm as a machine learning consultant—a popular topic in both neuroscience and many, many other fields.
If you want to excel as a consultant, you have to be a go-getter. You should be willing to take on new, unfamiliar projects, learn new skills and knowhow, and also be willing to work with people. Because you’ll be working with clients as well as a team of other consultants, you should be reliable and communicative. There’s a lot of presenting to clients, marketing, and storytelling.
Regardless of the type of consulting, there are a few similarities between consulting jobs:
■ As a consultant, you will jump from project to project as your firm takes on different clients. You will learn surface level awareness in a variety of different fields, depending on the projects you take on.
■ You’ll do a lot of reading and a lot of writing.
■ Some of your work will be alone, but much of it will be in coordination with a team.
■ Many consulting firms have a reputation for being really intense work environments, but this isn’t true of all firms.
■ Depending on where your clients are, you may need to do a fair amount of traveling.
■ For more technical consulting jobs, you can often work from home. However, this isn’t true if you need to meet with clients or your team mates.
■ A PhD isn’t necessary to get a job as a consultant, but it will help you develop the critical thinking, reading, writing, and communication skills that are core to consulting.
■ Consulting often pays pretty well. Starting salaries are between $115,000–$145,000 for PhDs.
If you’re interested in consulting, see these additional guides: