Article By Justyn Crane, Senior Consultant at Optima Systems Consultancy
As a Chartered Engineer I have worked in Systems Engineering and Operational Analysis for over 20 years in technology-based organisations. Moving into consulting 15 years ago enabled me to have a highly versatile career with the opportunity to help a wide variety of clients, companies and teams cross-sector to improve their organisational performance and delivery.
What do we mean by “being a Consultant” at Optima?
The job title “Consultant” or a business described as a “Consultancy” is often-used and little understood in many scenarios nowadays, including Systems Engineering. Admittedly, the profession has been associated with long hours and extensive travel but it’s not always the case. For us at Optima, we enjoy finding intellectually challenging responsibilities and activities to fulfil our career aspirations and growth within a supportive environment.
Being a Systems Engineering Consultant, for us, means that we’re challenged and mentally stimulated through the diversity of work and we need to be flexible to adapt to the environments that we’re working in. Overall, it feels personally rewarding to be able to provide your experience to clients that delivers results and add value.
Top 5 reasons to work for a consultancy
Starting out in consultancy is not just for graduates! Below follows an overview of possible reasons why a job in the consultancy sector can be an attractive option for experienced talent, too.
1. Diversity of work
Working for a consultancy like Optima, diversity means the range of work we can be involved with, across the industrial sectors from Defence to Civil Nuclear, across the product lifecycles, interacting with Chief Operating Officers and Engineers alike and delivering tangible items, like a ship, to intangibles such as assisting clients deliver organisational transformation.
This diversity requires us to be flexible, adaptable and to face up to this constant change at every stage of our working day, such that we can effectively influence and support our clients. It also means accepting and conquering imposter syndrome at the start of every new job when we have to instantaneously shape our experience and knowledge to get started at pace and with insight.
Equally, diversity can mean that unique skills are used with multiple clients, across multiple sectors to solve similar issues. At Optima, diversity does not mean thrown in at the deep end with no support, even in new roles there is always reach back support to colleagues who understand and can give you that leg up, when it is needed.
2. Delivering results
Our Consultants are expected to seamlessly operate well in both client teams and with their like-minded colleagues. We deploy into larger implementation projects teams, but most often we support smaller teams where our consultants can be expected to take much of their project role’s responsibility. Dealing with such a degree of responsibility, with the intellectual challenge and project complexity, are features that many of our Consultants are seeking.
To deliver the results that our clients require, we look for certain skills and traits in our people, these include:
- Logical reasoning and problem solving
Can you make sense of complex challenges faced by clients in a short timescale, and articulate viable solutions? Are you comfortable without the complete picture? We often face situations with a lack of data to analyse therefore we have to make reasonable assumptions and estimates based on our logical reasoning and experience. - Analytical skills
With the rise of digitalisation (as well as Big Data and Analytics), demand for analytical and quantitative skills among (consultancy) professionals is growing. Consultants regularly conduct research through their ability to gather and analyse data (and presenting their findings to clients), which forms a crucial skill for consultants. - Intellectual curiosity
We love curiosity in our consultants, it shows a willingness to learn and push the edges. This outlook helps when we work in diverse sectors and areas of expertise. It is also important in allowing us to break complexity down to its intrinsic parts and communicate that effectively to our client teams. - Leadership
We need our people to display empathetic leadership toward their clients, work collaboratively to approach a problem, guiding them during a project. - Initiative
We need to show initiative, both in delivery and discovery of work. With our consultants continuously busy solving complex problems, they have to find ways of identify the change required, develop the solutions and translate them into business plans, as well as seeing the longer-term growth potential with a client.
3. Personal growth
Working for a consultancy in comparison to other companies provides a great many possibilities for personal development. Our consultants work in an intellectually challenging environment, this allows them to continually acquire new skills and knowledge that can improve their CV with every project.
At Optima, we also have an attractive learning environment that places a focus on developing critical soft skills beyond technical expertise. It is key because we often find ourselves in situations where we need to facilitate large groups of ever-changing stakeholders in order to bring structure and consensus into the project. Our consultants therefore learn to work with and influence those around them, whilst dealing with sensitive situations. This constant challenge and problem-solving results in our team building a strong set of soft skills.
Another aspect of personal development lies in the training possibilities. We seek to build the skills and capabilities of our colleagues and set out a training strategy to provide us with a common language and definitions for our view of Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering. We actively build our consultants’ soft skills and soft systems knowledge to make our client experience as positive as we are able. Optima recognises the importance of knowledge within the consultancy sector, therefore continuous learning is always front and centre as a crucial element of our personal development plan. Each year we identify the development needs for every individual to match both their aspirations and the market demands.
4. Balance & support
Some parts of the consulting industry are infamous for seeing employees work beyond normal hours, with many consultants said to spend up to 80 hours on their job every week. This is certainly not the case at Optima! We strive to deliver exceptional value for our clients but we think that business has to balance with life. We’re all about our people and we want to ensure that our people are happy and healthy in their work, whilst also delivering great results for our clients effectively and efficiently.
Our culture is inclusive and positive, and our environment always prioritises wellbeing. We support our colleagues in all aspects of their lives, whether as an award-winning STEM content creator or as an individual in need of Mental Health First Aid, our team is important to all of us. Throughout lockdown we have held online socials, some of that have included our families, as a way to maintain the social cohesion and intimate feeling of working in a small, agile team. As a Consultant you will be expected to work closely with your clients and to perform however, we foster an environment where you can balance both work commitments, life commitments and our desire for you to thrive.
5. Attractive remuneration package
Optima recognises that attracting and retaining the best talent, in a market sector that has resource shortages, can only be achieved by offering a highly competitive package. This includes the flexibility to work in a way that meets your personal circumstances, an 8% pension contribution, share plan, comprehensive benefits package and competitive salary.
We’re hiring!
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