IT Consulting Future

Hello TE Members!

I am planning on opening a IT consulting business in the next 3 to 5 years. I plan to specialize in Cisco and Virtualization technology (CCNP and VCP) and PM. For those who know the ins and outs of consulting or have IT experience, what do you recommend on starting out?

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Comments

Essendon

While the idea's good, how do you intend acquiring business? Are you going to cold-call businesses or are you going to sign up with another company and hire out your services via them?

Whatever you do, ensure you dont let go of your main job. Start consulting out on the side, see how you go and if you like it. Only give up your regular job when the consulting starts to bring in atleast 70% of the money you make from the regular job.

One way people establish contacts, network and get references is by contracting. Contracting gets you more experience on varied infrastructure quicker and if you do a good job, there's the chance of repeat work and people being able to put in a good word for ya. Contracting is a good idea when you have a few years of experience under your belt because they expect you to hit the ground running and dont develop your skills or groom you. The downside to contracting is the thought in the back of the head of how long the contract would last and how you'd find a new one. The money is great, for sure, but you can keep raking the money once you've established contacts and have the knowledge and experience to backup those certs.

Find a niche and away you go. Well not that easily, but that's the idea. Constantly evolve, even if you are on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there (dunno where the quote's from). You have a good combo in mind, CCNP + VCP/VCAP is going to get you somewhere for sure. But you need the experience for someone to be able to give you free rein of their network.

For now, I reckon you should work on acquiring experience and plug away at those certs. Both the CCNP and VCP aint easy fish, get studying!

Good luck though, I also intend to be a sole consultant in the near future.

dave330i

An independent IT consultant with 3-5 years experience, CCNP & VCP? I wouldn't hire you. Not enough exp. Not enough certs.

JustFred

A bit harsh but understandable.

He could start with doing small businesses and build his resume and acquire more certs along that way. We all have to start somewhere and if he thinks he's ready then i don't see why he could not succeed.

dave330i

JustFred wrote: »

A bit harsh but understandable.

True. Kids put me in a bad mood this morning.

To OP,

Your best bet is to work for a service provider as an employee then transition as an independent consultant of said service provider.

jibbajabba

dave330i wrote: »

Not enough certs.

Who cares tbh. - if you got enough experience on your CV then no one cares about that.

If you do want to work in that area maybe try to work for a consultancy to begin with..

What I can tell you though is, that JUST Cisco and VMware won't be enough ... What IS important, especially with virtualization and cisco, is storage - you NEED to have experience in that area - I think the two major player EMC and NetApp was ALWAYS required when I went for consulting jobs - I never had any luck yet because of my missing storage experience.

Maybe try to work for a consulting company first - even companies like VCE - which incorporate all of the above (It's "V"Mware, "C"isco, and "E"MC after all) will give you at least the experience.

The competition is tough so good luck !!

Forgot to mention - there are two main kinds of consultants really - three probably.

1. You simply tell them what they need and you might get third parties to implement your design
2. You do the paperwork and implementation and then its up to the customer
3. You do end to end - design / implementation and support.

MOST big consultancies I have applied for did #3 ...

it_consultant

There are two things that potential clients always need help with; inbound and outbound phone tree and storage. In order to be successful in consulting you need to be quite competent in the things that most people have had a bad experience with. For me it was exchange migrations. By now, those are pretty easy. Virtualization is pretty easy. Cisco is pretty easy. Making everyone happy with their phones = hard.

High availability and backup are also good things to get to know really well, both for data and phones...