Guide to Becoming a Project Management Consultant

If you are planning to invest in learning a new skill or changing jobs to a different profile, a project management consultant might interest you. It is a highly demanded profession where you can help multiple clients or companies at a time to improve their efficiency and productivity. You will be stunned to know that around 68,000 job openings for project management specialists or consultants are projected to occur every year, which is expected to grow by 6% in the next decades, according to Job Outlook.

As a seasoned project management consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to help several businesses identify inefficiency and offer them helpful advice for their business growth. So, based on my 10+ years of experience in handling a number of challenging projects, I will help you understand everything required to become a successful project management consultant. I will also discuss the essential skills, the needed certifications, the salary you can earn, and how you can pave the path to make a career in this industry.

Who Is A Project Management Consultant?

A project management consultant is a specialist who provides strategic guidance to organizations on ways to manage their projects more efficiently. It can be an individual or a team of experienced professionals who offer project management consultant services. Whether it’s an individual or a firm, a project management consultant is crucial for every company to help them identify the challenges in handling operations and provide practical solutions to completing them on time. 

With the expertise of using advanced project management software such as Jira, Trello, Notion and more, a project management consultant saves time in planning, and streamline several activities needed to be handled. Their expertise in using these tools also helps them manage several projects at a time and offer customized solutions, identifying opportunities to improve. 

Now, let me navigate you to the real-life responsibilities handled by experienced project management consultants who contribute to increasing the quality and process of their clients’ work.

• A project management consultant understands the trend, evaluates the risk, and creates an effective strategy to help the organisation achieve their goals.
• The consultants are experts in analysing unforeseen situations, creating project roadmaps, and guiding the distribution of human resources for uninterrupted project execution.
• The project management consultant continuously monitors the progress of the work and provides immediate solutions to manage the hurdles if they occur.
• The project management consultants used to attend subsequent meetings with clients, resolve their queries, and follow up to ensure they received the desired goal.
• They are bound to help companies or clients achieve their deadlines by standing with them until the completion of the project, maintaining the quality standard.

What Is Project Management Consulting?

Project management consulting is a specialized service that plays a crucial role in helping organizations achieve their strategic goals through adequate planning, executing, and successfully delivering the expected result. The service can be offered by an individual or a company that involves working closely with clients to analyse their areas of improvement and implement effective solutions to boost the efficiency of their business operations. 

Project management consulting services are offered to provide customized solutions to different projects, varying from human resource planning to analysing business risk to meeting unrealistic deadlines. Whether it’s about IT system implementations or creating a successful large-scale construction venture, there is a need for project management consulting. If you want to offer such services, you will have to align your strategies with the organization’s goals and requirements while being within the limits of best practices.

Project Management Consultant Skills

You need to master several hard skills and soft skills to become a professional project management consultant. It will help you assist the businesses by understanding the areas that require improvement to achieve their goals. Based on my experience of handling a range of projects in the past decades, I have curated a few must-have skills below. It helped me achieve proficiency at work while keeping my clients happy by delivering results beyond their expectations. Believe me, learning these skills will definitely make your path easier to climb on the success ladder while handling several projects at a time.

Soft Skills

If you want to become an expert project management consultant, you must have the required soft skills to provide guidance and advice to businesses. You need to work on problem-solving capabilities, leadership quality, industry adaptability, and more. Here are some must-have software skills to make your task easy after becoming a project management consultant.

Communication Skills

You must polish your communication skills to handle different clients and offer them unique solutions. You need to learn the art of talking, guiding, and convincing the client to agree with what you are saying and the solution you are offering them. Sound communication skills also help you to negotiate, handle risks, manage resources, and many more things while maintaining an effective tone of voice.

Market Analysis

Before providing any concrete solution to your client, you will need to understand their competitors, the scopes they lack to meet the market trend, and the potential growth they can achieve after following your advice. You need to look closely at what competitors are doing, what new trends are going to influence productivity, and what the common challenges faced by people in that particular industry are.

Analysing Scope

Every business wants to get ready to face unforeseen situations while managing their present work. So, being a professional project management consultant, you will need to analyse their documentation, the effectiveness of products, objectives, and much more to offer them the right solution for improvement.

Analytical Skills

Analysing the key problems, resources, and inefficiency in project planning and execution is crucial to building a foundation for business success. You must have analytical skills to identify areas that require improvement, prioritise the tasks to be done on an urgent basis, utilising the manpower, equipment, and more to contribute to productivity. Analytical skills help develop a successful project strategy to help your client grow.

Time Management

Time management is an art that is associated with everything in your life. As a project management consultant, you need to complete everything within a time frame to gauge the result. So, you must practice breaking the complex work into parts, creating a schedule for client discussion, using time-tracking tools to stay on deadline, and significantly more that can boost your efficiency while handling multiple projects at a time. Once you learn to manage everything on or before the deadline, you have enough time to review the work with scope for improvement and hand over the project with peace of mind.

Decision Making

When you are handling a project, you need to make several decisions to offer the best solution in favour of your client. You need to get ready with reasoning to support your decision by identifying the purpose, the actual problem, the impact, and more once it is executed. You should also get ready to change your decision immediately if plan A doesn’t work or provide an alternate solution for plan B. All these scenarios require leadership qualities and strong decision-making skills to manage the project with ease.

Managerial Skills

There can be circumstances where you need to handle the last-moment pressure, sudden threats, risks, missed deadlines, lack of communication, and much more. At this time, you need to manage the situation with your extraordinary skill. You need to be calm and communicate with clients and their workforce, motivate them, prioritise the strategy, and significantly more. To manage these issues, you need to learn the right managerial skills.

Team Work

You can contribute to the growth of any business only if its team members agree with your decision, are open to discussing the challenges, and feel comfortable working with you. You need to be ready to adapt to their working culture, analyse their problems that require attention, and allow them to cooperate with you without any boundaries. Thus, you will need to build the right communication and leadership qualities to work efficiently with the team while offering your project consulting service.

Hard Skills/ Technical Skills

If you want to become a competent project management consultant, you need to master the required hard skills. You need to gain technical skills to manage your everyday tasks easier. For instance, you should learn advanced MS Office, report creation, PowerPoint presentation, and more. However, the exact requirement of hard skills may vary from industry to industry. 

To give you an example, when I was providing consultation to an information technology company, my in-depth knowledge of R, JavaScript, and PHP programming languages helped me easily manage the task. Further, my hands-on experience with Six Sigma, Agile, Extreme programming, and more helped me with my strategic approach. So, I am listing here the essential hard skills you should learn to become a professional project management consultant.

Accessing Operating System

When you need to work on several projects at a time, computers speed up the process, save time, and organise the data for easy access. I believe that you must be used to Windows, Linux, or Mac operating systems. But, you must invest your time in leveling up your knowledge of the operating system. It will help you install needful tools, access essential features with a click, and simplify your overall workflow. 

Data Management

Businesses can have lots of data in various formats that you need to manage while offering your project management consultation. You need to manage bulk data in the forms of text, graphics, images, and whatnot. Thus, you must learn about data management tools and techniques such as MS Excel, Google Spreadsheet, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and Burndown charts. It will help you collaboratively work with your client while sharing the real-time update.

Understanding Financial Statement

The advanced level of finance knowledge helps you evaluate the client’s business. With an understanding of the financial statement, you can easily read out a bunch of documents and identify your client's expenses, liabilities, assets, and cash flow. You can also conduct an audit to cross-verify the data and advise them for better financial planning. Further, you can assist them in saving money while filing tax returns or in routing the cash flow to increase the business revenue.

Learning Programming Language

Python, R, JavaScript, Ruby, and C# are some of the most in-demand programming languages that help you simplify your project handling. However, the need for understanding programming language might vary based on the industry in which you are working. You should learn one or multiple programming languages to effectively create decision trees, analyse historical data, manage user databases, increase machine learning efficiency, and countless more.

Data Analysis

Historical data helps you understand what happened in the past and what you can plan for in the future. However, manually managing a big database for several projects can be a tedious and time-consuming task for you. So, you must have technical expertise in working with Tableau, Google Analytics, SQL, Python, and other tools. It will help you with SWOT analysis, regression analysis, descriptive analysis, predictive analysis, and significantly more when you are advising your client to improve their problematic segment.

Creating Strategic Plan

You need to follow standard guidelines given by your client when you are working with them as a project management consultant. You need to consider local, environmental, legal, and other aspects while offering them a solution. Thus, you must practice analysing data, understanding business objectives, and adhering to their documented guidelines when you are creating a strategic plan for business modelling, finance management, manpower improvement, capital projection, and more. 

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Salary Of Project Management Consultant

According to some famous job-listing websites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and Monster, the average salary offered to an experienced project management consultant is $100,000 per year. Also, based on a report shared by Forbes, PMP-certified individuals earn 16% higher than those who don’t have any specific project management certification. 

Now, let me share some recent data for the average salaries offered to project management consultants in a few of the most popular countries:   

Project Consultant Vs Project Manager

I think now, you‘ve understood the clear definition of what is a project consultant. Let’s move further to understand the differences between a project management consultant and a project manager. I have curated below a detailed comparison between the project managers and project management consultants based on their responsibilities or aspects of their roles.

How To Become A Project Management Consultant?

To become a project management consultant, you need a sound educational background, technical knowledge, an understanding of business industries, PMP certification, and more. Having hands-on experience in handling several projects can also help you to begin your career. Besides, you must have some additional qualities, including industry experience, nice communication skills, and more, which I have discussed in the above section. Now, let me navigate you through the most efficient ways to become a project management consultant.

Fulfill Educational Qualifications

To fulfil the need of a project management consultant at any organisation, you should have basic educational qualifications. It includes a bachelor's degree in marketing, business administration, finance, or a related field. Moreover, a master's degree in the significant stream will be an add-on to make your profile stronger to serve as a project management consultant as you learn valuable skills within your course curriculum.

Know Your Strength And Weakness

To serve as a professional project management consultant to any company, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is important. The SWOT analysis will help you closely understand the inefficiency of a company or the project you are handling and provide the best possible solution accordingly. With these analyses, you can also work on your weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and easily increase your networks to get a handful of clients. 

Gain Practical Experience

Before handling any live projects, you must have enough experience in using the right tools and the process involved. You must have a clear understanding of the client’s requirements and the roadmap to help them rectify the probable problems. Getting PMP training from a reputed academy or working with companies on their in-house projects will help you understand and apply methodologies to become a professional and viable project management consultant. 

Get A Professional Certification

If you want to learn everything on your own to become a project management consultant, it will take years to master. So, enrolling in a professional certification course is always a profitable choice to ensure rewarding career opportunities with higher pay. It ensures that you have extensive and solid knowledge in project management to become a perfect consultant. Having the following project management certification will contribute to enhancing your credibility and recognition in the industry.

• ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner)
• PMP (Project Management Professional)
• PgMP (Program Management Professional)
• PfMP (Portfolio Management Professional)
• MPM (Master Project Manager)

Conclusion

I believe that now you have a good idea of what project management consulting is and how you can make a rewarding career by helping hundreds of clients looking for an expert to help them out. Being a certified project management consultant, you can help organisations optimise their operational practices, finance management, resource utilisation, and much more to give them effective results. 

If you dream of bringing a wealth of experience, expertise, and strategic solutions by addressing unique challenges faced by your potential clients, then get your PMP training and PMP certification now from a reliable institute. Get ready to be featured in the list of top consultants and serve organisations to solve their complex challenges with your hands-on expertise.

FAQs

1. How is consulting different from project management?

Project management consulting is different from project management in their ways of working and limitations. Consulting is an external service offered to engage with a business or entity with expert advice on particular areas, teams, or the whole process for improvement. Meanwhile, management is an internal resource or a team that works closely with employees to manage the complexities and simplify operations within a deadline.

2. What industries hire project management consultants?

Here is the list of industries that often hire project management consultants;

• Information Technology
• Banking and Finance
• Manufacturing
• Engineering and Construction
• Marketing and Advertising
• Educational Institutes
• Professional Service Provider