I hear stories about the mythical "Highly Paid Consultant". They are the people who the corporate bigwigs call in to design and implement the huge, mission-critical systems that will make or break the business.
Let's assume that I was an expert in some field of computers (I'm not, but let's just assume). How would I become a consultant? Are any of you currently a consultant? How did you get your start? Why do you prefer consulting over other sorts of positions that you would be qualified for?
Applying at a consulting firm would be the first place to start. Chances are that if you have enough experience in a certain field you should be able to find a consulting firm that will hire you doing on-site consulting. Build your experience from there and get some client interaction under your belt and then move on to your own firm.
I'm not sure where your at, so I can't recommend any places to start, but here is one that is around me and at least semi-nation wide.
I have found Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg to be absolutely brilliant, as well as easy and fun to read (not a small achievment in itself).
I just found it again in my bookshelf. It still has all those Post-it index tags in it :-)
How would I become a consultant?
This could be treated as a very wide-ranging question with a whole book's worth of answers, with separate editions per country. In practical terms, in the UK you would probably look at setting yourself up as a small one-person company or working under an umbrella company. The small company option generally allows you to keep your day job while doing some consulting on the side (check your day job's employment contract, naturally, but I know mine has a standard clause saying they're fine about outside work as long as you tell them about it). You should find yourself an accountant with experience/expertise with the UK's IR35 tax legislation, laws introduced to close up a loophole where people could set themselves up as private companies and carry on with the same job but pay way less tax.
With an umbrella company, you basically "work" for that company, so they take care of tax, national insurance through PAYE, all that. They then charge a fee or take a cut of your earnings. They won't generally guarantee you work, though. The next step up is, of course, working for a specialised consulting firm. Note that although clients might well be charged 1000 UKP (1,800 USD) a day (and yes, that's the fee, plus travel expenses on top of that, we have to pay for some consultants), you probably won't see most of that money.
As a private consultant, getting highly-paid consultancy jobs seems to mostly be a case of picking a suitible niche market (in a global world-wide-web market, even being the world's leading expert on COBOL-based shoot-em-ups or something is going to get you a client sooner or later), and simply having the cheek to charge lots of money. I saw one quote for someone to come in and set up a couple of standard Windows servers at 500 UKP (900 USD) a day, and he reckoned it would be 20 days worth of work.
Edit: Also, the first skill you'll need to perfect if you're a individual for-hire type consultant who picks up programming/web design work from remote clients (see SourceForge for a marketplace for that kind of work) is the art of getting user requirements nailed down really tight, otherwise you'll wind up working hours way over what you quoted when it turns out that what the user expected was way different to what you thought you were implementing.
Consultants are people with a skill that a company doesn't have and doesn't want to have permanently, but is willing to pay reasonably well to have temporarily.
The consultants you seem to be talking about are management consultants and to be honest it's unclear how these people actually get to be that way. In my experience the big consultancy firms, the likes of McKinsey, Accenture, Bain and so on, hoover up all the best graduates and post-graduates (they do like a fresh physics PhD) and instill in them a real sense of process, at which point they are then released in the world to deploy that process everywhere. Graduate well from your class, preferably in a numeric discpline, definitely from your tier one university, and then sit and wait for them to call.
You then have the other breed, in theory these are the expensive specialist who will drop in, solve your specific problem for a large fee and leave. In practice, in good times, these can be just about anyone with any technical skill.
In many companies consultants are common because they are "off balance sheet", which means that you can get around headcount restrictions because they are not permanent staff and can typically be released at much shorter notice with fewer strings to sever. Anyone can be one of these consultants, you just need to be able to play a confident role and not worry about being occasionally out of work. There are a lot of very average technical people earning quite astounding amounts of money for doing surprisingly little.
But with an economic climate such as we currently have, the opportunities for this type of work are reduced - in hard times, consultants are the luxuries that are first to be cut.
So, the way in?
Probably in that order.
In Europe it is more common to find consultancy firms that have programmers-for-hire as consultants rather than big-wig experts.
I'm currently working as a humble contractor under a consultancy firm. I cannot claim to be an expert of anything as I'm a generalist. Some contacts I had at the University recommended me the firm and I shortly got hired. The reason for me to work as a contracting consultant is job variety, the contracts are usually 6 months or 1 year long depending on what project you're working on. Between contracts I can spend some time to study on whatever new interesting thing comes up or teach something I know.
I guess this is the way I like it, being keen on learning new things but still get my hands dirty on whatever cool new stuff I am ordered to do. This is in contrast to get stuck in a rut with the same position for years (then again I do know some maintainance programmers who love their eternal bug hunting job).
Regarding benefits, it depends on the consultancy firm. I guess I got lucky with mine because because everyone receives health benefits and the firm have some active gym and sport communities (floorball ftw).
So to answer your question it all depends on what you want to do and what contacts you have. Look for a consultancy firm that would suit you and your qualifications, check with your friends or colleagues if there are any for reputation.
First, the reason the you're getting really long answers to this question is because there are so many different types of consulting. I'm going to assume you are talking about technical or software consulting, as opposed to management consulting.
In software consulting, you can consider a national consultancy (or international). The benefit for working with this type of organization is they generally have the luxury of allowing you to specialize. If you want to specialize on e-commerce applications using Rails, then if you find the right organization you can do just that. The downside is this specialization comes at the cost of travel. Your market is the world, and you go where the work is.
Another option is a local consultancy. These organizations generally serve a large city or region. You don't have to travel as much, but since your market is smaller, you find yourself becoming more of a generalist. Due to the lack of work, it is difficult to specialize unless your niche is really popular. But it is nice not to live in a hotel.
And don't forget the body shop. This is a somewhat derogatory term used to describe consulting organizations where you are simply a set of skills sold at an hourly rate to augment the staff of another organization. This is generally not the type of place of organization where you will called in to "implement the huge, mission-critical system." But if you want to work as an independent and you aren't good or don't enjoy sales, you can subcontract through this type of organization.
I would say that you can make decent money as a consultant, but the "Highly Paid Consultant" is somewhat of a myth. This is perpetuated by clients that make the assumption that if your rate is 100$ an hour, you are being paid $100 dollars an hour, or something close. This is generally not the case, unless you own the company. Overseas competition is high, and margins are tight because of it.
I got my start in consulting simply by applying to a consulting organization for an internship during college. I took the offer they gave me after I graduated, and I've been a consultant for the better part of 20 years. I've enjoyed it not so much because of the pay, but for the variety of technologies and companies that I've worked with. If there is one skill you will pick up as a consultant, it is learning about new technologies. Quickly.
Good luck to you and I hope that helped!
One observation is that many people become consultants having been made redundant from a full-time job....
Not sure that's a path I would recommend, however!
I dare to say that every answer so far got it completely wrong. First of all please refer to the difference between contracting (either as an individual or a company) and consulting: “What is the difference between consulting and contracting?”
Keeping that difference in mind to become a consultant you need to:
Develop a state-of-the-art knowledge of a specific topic.
Gain the community of practise recognition of your expertise.
Be able and willing to transfer your knowledge to others.
Market your abilities.
It is also important to understand that a consultant has to maintain their state-of-the-art understanding of a chosen topic, i.e. continuously re-invest time and money into keeping up with the latest developments in knowledge. Amongst the best ways of maintaining the expert status is actually to personally take active part in developing that selected area of technology.
Research, marketing, attaining the status of the expert in the eyes of community on the ongoing basis are costly. It follows that if you spend ca 30% of your working time researching, experimenting, learning and distilling experience and developing techniques for teaching others you just have to bill your clients significantly more than next guy who just applies the same run-of-the-mill knowledge he or she learned at a uni over and over again.
Obviously, state-of-the-art is ideal. In practise the level of knowledge is relative to a customer and as long as you know significantly more about a topic and able and willing to transfer the knowledge you can consult.