Nice, that's what i'd love to do. Just can't afford the pay cut. Am hoping to get more involvement in the implementation of our new system and then jump over to a consultancy role in that. Hoping it'll have less financial impact if i already have a good basis.
What did you do prior?
Was a really tough cut for me to take but I did want to start my own career wierdly, although that salary double within 12 months. Previously I managed our family business so approached the role from a non IT route, not really relevant to the specific job but as it's more business process and advisory I think my background was much more beneficial. Just things like managing teams, implementing new software/process to make things more efficient, talking to customers in particular those at a higher/board level were all really useful daily tasks.
Customers (in the non technical streams of the project) don't care about the config, settings or the ins and outs of how the application hangs together, they want to give you a process and you advise them how that will be in the new system along with any business process recommendations along the way.
Graduate schemes are very rare, so usually every partner is looking for someone like you (end user on a project implementing the product) as that's generally the quickest transition into a £1200 a day consultant they can charge out without all the product training hassle.
Usually an end user would come in as a junior consultant on around £30-40k and within 3/4 years you should really be looking at £55k-70k. Then there would be senior consutlant in your specialist field (finance/Warehousing/Retail) and the next step would be Solution Architect which you'd be looking at £85-110k. You can easily get more if you want to just keep moving around the partners taking payrises left right and centre - Or look to contract at £500-£650 a day with 3-4 years experience under your belt.
If it is Microsoft your dealing with and need any advise/recruiters to speak to or general info on partners then let me know.
