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Growing trend in consulting - Hiring of functional and sectoral experts on contract

Historically , leading global management consulting firms have always brought in grey haired experts , who have held very senior leadership roles in their industry , to manage and satisfy client expectations. During this phase, bulk of consulting work would be delivered by in-house full time generalist consultants.

Over time , clients have become more demanding and with that came a phase where subject matter experts in functions & sectors were hired by consulting firms as full time employees. However utilisation of these highly specialised  resources  has always been a challenge as the demand for such  skills may not always exist.  Moreover , traditional consulting firms have struggled to find the right way to culturally integrate industry experts into main stream consulting. 

Therefore , in the past few years, consulting firms are looking at a more agile and flexible model to onboard people with similar expertise through a plug and play model.� Here, star professionals from the industry are selected to join projects for a fixed tenure , say for 6 to 12 months . After� initial coaching they start delivering on client engagements. It gives an opportunity for the organisation to assess the capabilities of the expert both from content and cultural fitment perspectives. Moreover it provides immense savings on overall costs.� If the expert excels, he/she is absorbed as full time consultants or gets a contract extension to work on another project, thus making this an win-win opportunity for both experts and the consulting organisation.

Though this model looks risky from experts point of view , given that many of them would be giving up a full time industry role for this, but it provides them a lateral entry opportunity to work on a live consulting project , with the possibility of global exposure and working with best in class clients.� As a result, we are seeing an upsurge in interest from industry experts to opt for this arrangement. We feel that consulting firms will further increase intake of experts on contract , as they are already experiencing immense value and the same goes for industry experts .

MavensWorld is working with� experts globally and several of them have been assigned to consulting firms. Many have got contract extensions and some of them have been absorbed internally. Our aspiration is to be the bridge that connects global consulting opportunities with our universe of experts.