Choosing a career is the hardest decision ever. If you take one wrong decision, it can jeopardize your whole life. Commonly, people look for good pay, incentives, career growth, and stability in a job. With the advancement of technology and time, we’ve seen an evolution in the job industry with more and more new companies coming up and creating a job space in the market.
Let’s begin with explaining what is a ‘consultancy’ firm and a ‘corporate’ firm.
A consulting firm is a company with experts (consultants) providing professional advice to an organization or an individual for a fee. Consultancies have become a talent source in recent times for companies looking to hire people for leadership positions.
And a corporate is a legal entity that is separate and distinct from its owners. Organizations seeking to transform themselves are hiring talent with a consulting background to boost performance.
When it comes to choosing a job in a consultancy, people usually prefer to work at a ‘corporate consultancy’ over an ‘HR consultancy’. This is because they feel corporates are better employers than a consultancy. Today, let’s resolve the doubt on the difference between consultancy and corporate.
Working at any niche consultancy could also give the same job satisfaction which people usually expect out of a corporate job. In reality, there is actually a very thin line in between working at a corporate and a consultancy. As a matter of fact, a consultancy can operate like a corporate as well.
Let me walk you through the realities of working at a consultancy and the perks that the employees get, which most corporates usually do not give to their employees.
1) Generation of incentives and higher wages: Consultancies, in general, pay higher salaries to its employees. With the advancement of work and growth in the work process, appraisals also tend to increase. A consultancy is often considered as an incentive-driven sector, which implies that one gets to earn more incentives in a consultancy than a corporate. Consultancies have limitations when it comes to their workforce and that is why pay hikes are more frequent in such companies. Bigger the company, smaller the hikes.
2) Learning and gathering skills: A consultancy arms its employees with more skills. Consultants work on projects that are complicated for other companies to complete themselves. In addition, consultants have to meet deadlines and complete critical work with ease. They learn and gather new skills every day. In a corporate setup, an employee usually specializes and becomes an expert in a single area within a company and thus the area of growth stays limited.
3) Opportunity to work and grow: Any niche company dealing in consulting gives its employees the benefit to work with many different types of organizations and also across vast number of fields. This helps in increasing expertise across various domains. These experiences take an employee to great heights and help in accelerating career advancement, thus offering greater flexibility.
4) Organizational structure – climbing up the ladders in a consultancy: The clichéd idea that a consulting firm does not have any growth ladder and everybody working in there does not get an opportunity for promotion is actually wrong. A consultancy does have hierarchies. The basic structure of any consultancy comprises of an Analyst, Consultant, Senior Consultant, Engagement Manager, Partner and Managing Partner. All of these have subheads divided into teams. Apart from these, there is staff in support for functions such as HR, Administration, Marketing and Finance.
When choosing an area of work or a job sector, a candidate should concentrate on a few important things:
1) Role of the employee in the organization: The degree of independence which the organization is offering and how diversified one’s role is.
2) Employee satisfaction: Proper growth, learning, incentives, and also the area to improve.
So food for thought, people should always choose the company when making a career decision and not restrict themselves to small debates such as, if it is a corporate or a consultancy. Now that you know enough about the difference between consultancy and corporate, we would like to know your views on what you think is a better choice, and why? Leave your comments below and let us know:
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