Consulting is one of those careers that sound nice, but most people have no idea what we actually do. How can you blame them? Consulting is a very broad term.
Even when you put "management" in front of the word, it doesn't narrow it down too much, but I guess you get the idea that it has something to do with companies or businesses.
Management consulting as defined in wikipedia is the "practice of helping organizations improve their performance...."
Ok ... so what does that entail?
In my current project, I am helping my client (an insurance company) manage a project that they are undergoing in their finance department. The finance department, as you can imagine, is constantly dealing with numbers to figure out the company's current financial position and to forecast its future position.
Doing so requires gathering and calculating data, analyzing results of the calculation, making financial reports, etc. I don't know how companies did this back when computers didn't exist, but before major enterprise systems became mainstream, companies often used microsoft excel or access to do all of this work - which, although much more efficient than doing by hand, still takes a lot of work. you would know, if you've ever fiddled with any of these softwares.
So my client currently uses a lot of excel and access and they are looking to automate much of this process so people aren't copying and pasting cells or running macro all day long. That's where these "systems" come into play. I think girls are generally allergic to anything that mentions IT or systems, but you'd be surprised to see how much of it we actually use and how different (or how inconvenient) life would be without it.
A system according to wiki is "is a software system which has components as its structure and observable Inter-process communications as its behavior." what??
To put it simply, a system is a software on your computer that helps you do things a lot faster.
So what I do for a living, is help my client implement a software that helps the company do finance-related tasks faster.
How do i help? I help by making sure that the project meets deadlines, that all issues are resolved in a timely manner, and that all stakeholders are aware of the status and progress of the project.
The last bit is where my bilingual skills come in handy.
My client is an American company with operations all over the world. I am in charge of reporting to the headquarters in the US about how the project is coming for their Japanese operations - whether it is on schedule or delayed.
I basically serve a bridge between the two countries. A skill that is increasingly in demand with globalization.
I have my parents to thank for providing me with an environment that allowed me to be both bi-cultural and bilingual, but now it's my job to make the most of it. I think I'm doing an okay job so far.
