So You Want to Be a Technology Consultant: Congratulations, You’re Basically Google with a Heart

There are people out there who are caffeinated, always changing their minds, and can speak both jargon and crap. Yes, that’s the tech consultant. These are the smooth-talking, spreadsheet-wielding heroes behind every company that couldn’t figure out why their “digital transformation” failed after spending $2 million on a chatbot that couldn’t spell “customer.”

They aren’t really IT people or managers, but they nevertheless charge more per hour than a good psychiatrist. So get your expensive cold brew, turn off that Teams ping, and let’s figure out the wonderful, crazy world of the technology consultant—the guy corporations call when something breaks or when no one understands what’s broken.

The Job That No One Gets (Not Even the People Who Do It)

What is a technology consultant, anyway? It depends on who you ask. To a startup founder, you’re a wizard. Your parents think you “fix computers.” For you? You just want to sound like you know what “enterprise integration” means while you and your friends nod along on Zoom.

Truth be told: Technology consultants don’t fix problems; they change them till they are paid.

You spend half your day saying things like “Let’s circle back.”

“We are considering a cloud-based solution that has the potential to scale alongside our needs..”

“That’s a good question.” (Translation: I don’t know.)

You start meetings with “just to align expectations” and end them with “let’s table that.” Every suggestion you make starts with “strategic” and finishes with “optimization.” It’s a linguistic exercise meant to make chaos sound like a process.

You really help businesses certain days. On other days, you just make graphs until you feel better.

The PowerPoint Economy: A Beautiful Place for Ideas to Die

PowerPoint is like a god to every technology consultant. Decks are your canvas. Your portfolio. The document that helps you with your feelings. You don’t give outcomes; you give slides.

Fonts and color-coded timetables are how real consultants measure achievement.

If you show your client in hex code and gradient bars, everyone will clap, even if they’re on fire. The PowerPoint isn’t simply a show; it’s a performance.

Your task is to look knowledgeable while saying the obvious: “You need a digital strategy.”

“Have you thought about moving to the cloud?”

“Don’t keep passwords in plain text, maybe?”

No kidding, you’ve probably written whole reports that only say “update your browser.”

And the best part? You can charge $300 an hour to explain to business leaders how the “internet” works. A consultant’s PowerPoint is like the Bible: you never read it, but you always quote it.

Buzzword Bingo: Using Tech Terms Without Actually Saying Anything

Every consultant has a secret superpower: they can say nothing in 30 slides. What about technology? Oh, you mean “integration that can grow to support multiple channels and work across platforms.” Put the stupid cable in, please.

Here’s a fun fact: consultants come up with new buzzwords every year to keep their jobs. People don’t need them, but they keep spreading like mold in a business.

“Digital transformation” (a fancy way to express “we bought new software”) and “cloud-first strategy” (we lost the USB drive) are two of the best hits.

“Blockchain integration” (we needed a reason to seem new in 2017)

“Synergy” (we’re not sure what it means, but we’re excited)

You might come into a meeting and say, “Let’s use agile frameworks to make the interface as smooth as possible,” and every VP in the room would write it down as if it were the truth.

No one understands what you’re saying. No one ever will. That’s the point.

A Love-Hate Story About Consultants and Real IT People at Work

This is the thing: People who work in IT make things. Technology consultants make presentations about how to develop things.

IT: “We need more memory.

Consultant: “Let’s change the order of our computing priorities to make the most of our operational bandwidth.”

The IT staff thinks you’re an outsider who makes too much money. You think of them as dirty data goblins who keep the keys to the kingdom. And yet, the two must live together, always needing each other like divorced parents on Bring Your Kid to Work Day.

Strong statement: PowerPoint is how consultants think. Command lines are how IT thinks. Neither of them knows how to order coffee with more than three syllables.

And yes, you did tell an engineer to “think more strategically,” and he hasn’t said good morning to you since.

Client Calls: Where Sanity Goes to Die

Every consultant has that one client that sends 19 “urgent” emails on Sunday night about how to format something. You join yet another “alignment session,” but then you find out that no one knows what they are aligning on.

The client adds, “We want to come up with new ideas.” You say, “What do you have to spend?” They say, “Hope.”

That’s when you should use the sacred phrase, “Let’s take that offline.”

Here are all the consultant calls, in three parts:

“We’ve already tried that,” says denial.

Anger: “Why does this cost so much?”

Acceptance: “Can you put more animations on the deck?”

By the end of the week, you’ve spent 40 hours describing problems, diagnosing nothing, and somehow getting recognized for “great insights.”

Meetings are basically paid improv sessions where people use spreadsheets as props.

The Consultant Lifestyle: Looks Great Until You See the Bills

The dream? Planes, laptops, and the adrenaline of hustling culture.

The truth? Ten-hour days writing bullet points on someone else’s uncertainty, including an expense report that HR will “review next month.”

Life as a consultant is based on:

Coffee is stronger than your limits.

Airline miles that you will never use.

Posts on LinkedIn on “empowering innovation” at 2 a.m.

For real: You don’t sleep like most people do; you have “client time zones.”

But you’re still addicted. The rush of adrenaline. The desire to make PowerPoint ideal. The wonderful rush of dopamine as your slide finally lines up. You don’t really work for clients deep down. You work for validation in Arial.

Nobody wants to be a consultant. They just wake up one day with two monitors and Stockholm Syndrome.

The Art of Getting Paid to Google Things: Technology Consulting

Let’s stop using jargon. Most consultants are like Google searches with better lighting. You act like you know how the system works, say “paradigm shift” under your breath, and then spend the weekend asking ChatGPT how to set it up.

The best time for consultation is: Copy and paste an answer, add a logo, and title it “deliverables.”

You don’t have to know a lot about technology; you just have to sound like you do. Half of everything you know comes from calling common sense a “methodology.” What about the other half? Coffee and blind faith.

But somehow, you’re an important element of the business ecology, acting as a bridge between dysfunction and denial. PowerPoint is necessary when chaos and confusion collide.

And that’s what consulting is, darling.

In conclusion :-

you get paid therapy with better branding.

You made it to the end, so congrats! You might be able to work as a consultant. You know how to use jargon, get addicted to caffeine, and feel like you’re not really there. The good news is? You will always be learning. The bad news? You’ll always act like you know what you’re talking about.

Welcome to the world of technology consulting, where every problem has ten frameworks, every solution has three decks, and every charge has extra hours “for quality review.” Now go out and set expectations, and remember: if you’re not sure, say “synergy.” It fixes everything.