Over the years, many leading organizations have struggled to retain top talent. Employees who leave often cite lack of recognition, professional growth, and reward for their long hours of dedication and hard work as key reasons for pursuing other opportunities.
Today, the rise of remote working has enabled many employees to re-evaluate their employment options once again. Remote working allows employees to spend more time around family, pets, and nature, which can have an overall positive affect on their mental, physical, and emotional well-being. These benefits can be just as important as the monetary rewards that come with the job. In addition, remote working has also allowed employees to have more flexibility, freedom, and control over how they carry out their role. Since companies compete to attract and retain top talent, these shifts in how the workplace is organised are likely to persist. This will lead to a permanent change in the traditional ways of working. For instance, remote working has given rise to alternatives to the traditional employment contract in the form of freelancing or contractual work.
Business organisations and management consultants have long had a contractual rather than an employer/employee relationship. In 2017, Warton published an article that highlighted the rise of contractual workers in both the private and public sectors. Consultants are one example of these contractual workers in the sense that consulting firms are legally bound by a contractual agreement to their respective client. However, most top consultants still remain employees of a particular consulting firm, whereas the rising cohort of genuinely contractual workers are self-employed freelancers.
I recently worked on a consulting project where the title of one of the managers was “regular contractor”. This was the first time that I had directly worked with a consultant who had started out as an employee and gone on to become an independent contractor to the organisation. This arrangement gives him flexibility and allows him to offer his services on his terms. He decides the hourly rate for his services, sets deadlines for deliverables, and has the freedom to pick and choose which projects he wants to work on based on his experience.
With my interest to learn more about contractual work having been sparked, one of the main questions I asked my manager was “why contractual employment?”. Normally consultants who leave the consulting industry take up positions working for a former client organisation or go on to start their own companies. For my manager, the extensive knowledge, experience, and skills he had gained as an employee at a top consulting firm allowed him to start his own consultancy. Feeling that he wasn’t being challenged enough in his role as an employee, he sought alternative opportunities. He discovered that working independently allowed him to identify gaps within the strategy consulting industry that he easily would have missed if he had been working as a employee. Since employees are subject to strict rules and regulations governing how work is carried out for a client, this often leads them to play it safe, even at more advanced career levels. In contrast, contractors have more autonomy over the type of advice and the type of deliverables that they can produce. For example, as a freelance contractor, my manager has the freedom to act on the advice he gives to clients and work with them as they implement recommendations, rather than either leaving prior to implementation or merely performing the work for them.
The rise of contractual employment offers businesses the benefit of agility and adaptability by turning full-time employees into freelancers. From a financial perspective, this allows businesses to turn a fixed cost (i.e., wages) into a variable cost (i.e. fees for work performed under a contract). In an uncertain economic climate, this offers businesses more flexibility to reduce headcount quickly if they need to. It also provided organizations with access to a wider range of knowledge and skills as contractors can be hired on a short-term basis for the specific expertise they are able to deliver.
The bottom line
Consulting as a contractor is a career option that you should seriously consider if you are a subject matter expert who has gained the necessary skills and expertise to venture independently. In terms of flexibility and autonomy, consultants who operate as contractors can decide what services to offer, when and how to offer those services, and what prices to charge. Although more freedom and higher pay rates also come with more responsibility. The relationship that a contractor has with a company will differ significantly from the relationship that an employee has with the same organisation. Contractors need to be highly disciplined, organised, and have excellent time management skills. They also need to manage their own training, resource development, and financing. For example, the higher pay rates that contractors are able to charge are to some extent offset by the fact that contractors don’t receive employment benefits like holidays or sick leave.
The business environment is evolving rapidly, and this can offer a source of good fortune for consultants who are prepared for the opportunity of self-employment.
Thanduxolo Love Mtsweni is a Management Consultant Analyst at Accenture in South Africa. She holds a Bachelor of Administration in International Relations and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management (PDM- Business Administration). She is passionate about empowering the youth, and advocating for better youth employment opportunities.
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