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Technical professionals should develop skills in four major areas to be effective consultants:
1. Business foundation –
Understanding how businesses operate – from sales and marketing to operations and accounting.
2. Project management –
- Effective time management
- Knowing when to escalate problems
- Understanding impact of critical paths
- Effective resource allocation
- Ability to balance customer needs with project constraints
3. Interpersonal & communication –
- Broad people skills
- Negotiation skills
- Strong writing skills
- Adaptive communication style
4. Consulting & problem solving –
- Adaptive data gathering skills
- Critical analysis skills
- Ability to tailor a response to the customer needs
- Effectively manages customers & customer situations
- Looks beyond today’s project & needs
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