The Ultimate List of the Top-Ranked Consulting Skills That Get Jobs

To craft a winning resume and jump-start a career in the consulting field, one must have relevant education, at least some work experience, and, preferably, some professional accomplishments to show on a resume. But, most importantly, one needs to possess the right consulting skills.

In this guide, we are going to take you through the list of the top skills you need for becoming a consultant, explain how to get them, and share tips for putting them on a resume.

What Is Consulting?

Basically, the term “consulting” is used to define when someone is providing analysis, recommendations, or opinions on a specific matter to individuals or organizations, based on their own expertise. So, what do consultants do? Well, they basically provide expert advice.

Specialists in this career field can provide advice on numerous matters. For example, they may provide advice to organizations concerning business growth opportunities or share their expertise on how to improve a specific process. The topics and niches are endless.

Consulting Technical Skills

What technical skills do consultants need? Consulting is an all-encompassing niche. Given that different consulting firms can focus on different industries, the set of skills required for the job can vary significantly from one role to another.

Yet, some of the most top-ranking hard skills for this field include:

• Analytical skills;
• Data modeling and visualization;
• Cash flow management;
• SEO/SEM marketing;
• Knowledge of foreign languages;
• Proficiency in various computer tools for automation and data management (for example, Excel and others).

Consulting Non-Technical Skills

Apart from the technical skills we’ve discussed earlier, there are also non-technical skills needed for consulting jobs. The soft skills for occupations in this field mostly revolve around interpersonal, teamwork, and communication skills. But, there are also many other, not less important abilities.

Namely, some of the key skills that employers pay attention to include:

• Management;
• Organizational skills;
• Problem-solving;
• Time management;
• Leadership;
• Multitasking;
• Ability to collaborate with other staff members within the company;
• Continual learning;
• Adaptability;
• Verbal and written communication.

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Top Vital Skills That Help to Land a Job

When recruiting firms scan piles of applications to find the most qualified candidate, they typically focus on skills the most. Therefore, in order to impress recruiters and make them want to invite you to an interview, you have to ensure that your skills section has everything they are looking for.

Here are the top skills for consulting jobs that you can put on a resume:

• Problem-solving;
• Communication;
• Organization;
• Attention to details;
• Collaboration;
• Tech skills: Excel, SQL, VBA, Python, Hadoop, etc.

Problem-Solving

One of the key goals of a consultant (regardless of the field) is to provide helpful information that will help others find the best solution for a specific problem. Thus, problem-solving is by far one of the most crucial skills for consulting specialists.

Being in this role, you may be called in to provide consulting for various issues. So, you need an outstanding problem-solving ability to be able to analyze the problem, predict an outcome, and suggest the best solution.

Imagine your customer gets a product that doesn’t match their needs and budget. The customer will be unhappy - an issue that will definitely hit the company’s reputation. Hence, an example cover letter will tell you how professionals solved problems as a part of their work experience.

Communication

Another big point among the top skills for consultants is communication. Whether you work with individual customers, your co-workers, or organizations, in any case, you will have to interact with many different people. Thus, it is crucial that you know how to provide the best customer service and lay out your ideas in a clear manner, both written and verbally.

So, if you want a job in this field, you should take time to brush up on your communication skills.

Organization

Whenever someone hires a consultant to assist with a project or any other matter, they expect to receive prompt, high-quality, and effective help. Often, until you solve the problem, it will take lots of meetings, presentations, documents, and plenty of other issues. And, in order to handle everything right, you will need to have a decent level of self-organization. Therefore, a proper organization is also among the top consulting skills that can drive a recruiter’s attention and help you land an interview.

Attention to Details

No consulting skill set can go without outstanding attention to detail. Being a consultant, you will be dealing with different cases, many of which may be complex and important. And a client or a company that hires you to assist in any process will trust you. Not to mention the need to work with a large amount of data that all need to be accurate. So, in order not to fail, it is imperative to have attention to detail.

Collaboration

The last point on our top consulting skills list is collaboration. But, it’s no less important. As a consultant, you will often have to work with different job levels, from regular employees to the company’s board. This fact alone stresses the importance of having strong teamwork skills. You have to be able to collaborate with others effectively. And, this also means that you have to demonstrate friendliness, politeness, respect, and patience toward anyone else you will have to work with.

How to Improve Consulting Skills

Becoming a business consultant is the best way to boost skills. Consider taking an internship. Such an experience will help you learn about the job responsibilities from the inside, get involved in working on client cases and get used to following the instructions.

To land your first consultancy job, you only need a resume that can get past the ATS (applicant tracking system), and SkillHub can help you with that!

Follow Influencers in the Field

To boost your job skills, try following a solid consulting blog like these:

1. Consulting Success - one of the biggest blogs for consultants with excellent content.
2. Irresistible Consulting Moments - this blog is run by David Fields, who is an experienced consulting coach.
3. Consulting Matters - a fairly new blog, which, however, brings lots of value.
4. Jacq Hackett Consulting - this blog is perfect for gaining expert guidance on everything from finding your first job to handling clients details right.
5. Actionable Consultants - this blog is about the trends, technology, news, and changes in the consulting niche.

Also, to learn more about consulting requirements, trends, and techniques, consider following these top-rated Twitter experts:

1. Mike Arauz
2. Kimberly N. Evans
3. Stephen Monaco
4. Roger L. Martin
5. Tara Gentile
   

Sample for Consulting Resume Skills Section

Simply having all the key consulting skills is not enough to land a job. To succeed, you need to demonstrate your skills on a resume in such a way that it gets noticed by the applicant tracking system and outdoes ATS bots. In this part, we will show you how!

Consulting Skills in a Resume Skills Section

There are two chances to show an employer that you are a qualified candidate with your resume, and the first one is the skills section of your CV.

This section typically appears at the bottom of a resume, following after the experiences and education sections. To put your skills there the right way, you need to list the most important ones and align them with the skills needed for consulting from the job description.

Example:

Skills

• Excellent communication skills
• Time management
• Organization skills
• Proficiency in Google Suite and MS Office

Consulting Skills in an Experience Section of a Resume

One more section that every hiring manager pays close attention to is the work experience section, so it is another place to demonstrate your abilities.

Here’s an example of how to show your skills for consulting in the experience section:

• Leveraged strong project management skills to manage multiple emergency preparedness projects
• Coached the company’s leaders on business opportunities
• Helped customers design and implement an effective CRM strategy and custom roadmaps

To Sum Up

Becoming a consultant requires having a whole range of experiences, qualifications, and, of course, skills. Luckily, after reading our guide, you should have a better idea of what skills are there and how you can use them to engage potential employers and get more interviews.

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