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Transitioning to Consulting: The Changing Value of Your Time

Time is like currency. You spend time completing tasks, eating meals, working out, and hanging out with friends. When you spend your time, it is not lost, but rather exchanged for something else. You may receive a salary, full belly, stronger muscles, or simply an enjoyable time. This basic transaction occurs every day of your life.

Just like currency, time can have a different value depending on where it is spent. In a casual position, you receive a defined wage, say $15 per hour. In a full time position, you might be expected to work 40 hours per week in exchange for a yearly salary of $75,000. In this kind of role, you might end up working slightly more or less hours than projected, resulting in a fluctuating hourly wage. On the other end of the spectrum is the life of a graduate student – a potentially unpaid or low-paid worker who is expected to work an endless number of hours per week.

This article outlines the differences in time commitments for graduate students versus full-time consultants. It also offers a way to prepare yourself for the transition to consulting by providing you with some suggestions on how to implement a consultant-like scheduling method. This will help you practice being a consultant and improve your time management skills before graduation.

Time Commitments in Graduate School

Many things vie for the time and attention of a graduate student. In addition to time spent physically inside the classroom attending lectures, time is also spent completing assignments, visiting faculty office hours, and preparing for examinations. Many students, including Ph.D. candidates, will also have teaching and research duties. Teaching responsibilities may range from grading homework to teaching a full course, while research duties may range from creating a poster presentation to drafting a full dissertation.

To become an attractive candidate for consulting positions, graduate students must also obtain leadership experience within clubs, societies, and organizations. They must also contribute to projects outside the classroom and laboratory, which might include being part of a pro-bono consulting club, participating in local volunteer events, working as a freelancer, or assisting a start-up company. Students need to add these other commitments into their busy schedule without sacrificing too much time from their core student responsibility.

Time Commitments in Consulting

In academia, you exchange your time for research papers and projects. In industry, you exchange your time to build and sell products and services. In consulting, this involves serving a select group of clients. The invoice that is delivered to the client at the end of the day is not a list of goods provided or reports completed, but rather a detailed account of the time spent working on agreed deliverables. Like a gold-backed currency, time is the scarce commodity that underpins a consultant’s value.

Each firm has a unique way of keeping track of the time their consultants spend on projects: i.e. Charge Codes, Billable Work, and Project Hours. At the end of the week, the consultant charges each day, hour, and minute spent on various projects to the appropriate client. Consultants cannot charge the same time to multiple projects, so multitasking is not encouraged. Clients don’t want to pay for half of your attention, after all!

Adopting a Consulting Work Style in Graduate School

If you desire to become a consultant, you should avoid completing graduate school like an undergraduate student. Undergraduates tend to cram for their assignments and study just before the exam, often spending late nights at the library. They make up for copious amounts of last-minute studying at the end of a semester by taking time off during the holidays, spring break, and during the summer months. They also often attempt to multi-task, for example by completing other coursework during lectures, studying while eating, and sleeping in the library. While this might work during a bachelor’s degree, this will not work in graduate school nor consulting.

To prepare for a career in consulting, adopt an organized and focused approach to completing tasks. Start by listing all your major responsibilities, from classes and teaching to research and clubs. When you are ready to work, close your email, put your phone on silent, and pull up your favorite music. Select one task, start a timer, and work until you need a break. Keep track of how much time you spent on that task, record it in your diary or in a spreadsheet, and then move on to the next task. No multi-tasking, no distractions during each block of work, and fully commit to your break when you take one.

At the end of the week, calculate how much time you spent on each task, and compare it to how much got done. You did not read enough articles? Budget more time next week for journal articles. You got ahead on all your grading? Adjust your schedule so the next week you can work on something else. If you keep track of your time during the entire year, you can produce a nice little report for yourself or your advisor that shows how you spent your time and the outcomes you achieved. Not only will you accomplish more by limiting distractions, but you will also become more efficient and effective with your time.

The bottom line

As a student, your time is incredibly cheap. As the law of supply and demand would suggest, when you have a surplus of time available, its value will naturally decrease. However, when you become a consultant, there will be many demands on your time. Since there are only 168 hours in a week, there is a limited supply, and the value of your time will increase dramatically.

If you can learn how to manage your time while its value is still cheap, you will be better prepared for the time-scarce world of consulting, and able to hit the ground running.  This will help you to use time more efficiently and effectively, which will be highly valued by your firm and its clients.  Your productivity will help you to stand out compared with your less prepared peers, and give you increased access to interesting projects and early promotion opportunities.

Ricky Hollenbach is a Thermal Sciences Associate at Exponent Scientific and Engineering Consulting. He solves problems in the thermal-fluids, heat transfer, and turbomachinery disciplines. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Duke University.

Image: Unsplash

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