Management consultants, in practice also known as business consultants or organizational advisors, are consultants who focus on all sorts of organizational concerns from strategy to a variety of elements within management. Management Consulting is a collective term used for all services that fall under Strategy Consulting, Operations Consulting and HR Consulting. For that reason, management consultants form the vast majority in the advisory branch – more than half of all advisors can be defined as a management consultant.
Operations consultants are consultants who help clients improve the performance of their operations. Consultancy activities in this segment vary from advisory services to hands-on implementation support, for both primary functions (e.g. Sales, Marketing, Production, etc.) as secondary functions (e.g. Finance, HR, Supply Chain, ICT, Legal, etc.). Operations Consultants form the largest segment within the advisory branch, and the majority of consultants are active within one of the many underlying operating areas. Seeing as the operations is often associated with the strategy and technology side of a company, active operations consultants regularly work side by side with experts from these domains.
HR consultants help clients with human capital questions within their organizations and / or with improving the performance of the HR department. Chief topics central to the job description of HR consultants are, among others, organizational changes, change management, terms of employment, learning & development, talent management and retirement. HR consultants are also brought in by organizations to help transform the business culture within their organization, or transform their HR department, which includes changes in the area of organizational design, processes and systems, among others. HR consulting forms, together with strategy consulting, the two smallest segments of the consultancy industry, and the number of consultants active in this domain is, therefore, lower than those in other parts of the industry.
The term Strategy Consultant is used to describe consultants who operate at the highest level of the consultancy market, with focus on strategic topics like corporate and organizational strategy, economic policy, government policy and functional strategy. For this reason, strategy consultants generally carry out work assigned by top managers, like CEOs, directors and senior managers. Seeing that the nature of strategy consulting differs from the other more implementation and operational driven areas, strategy consultants generally have a different profile than their peers. Their focus lies more on quantitative/analytics skills, and their job description revolves more around giving advice than overseeing implementation.
A Marketing Consultants job is to focus on developing strategies in order to successfully promote, sell and distribute goods and services to targeted consumers. On a larger scale, marketing serves as a viable means of getting a new brand name, product or service into the public eye and transforming it into a lucrative business. Companies, therefore, seek the expertise of marketing consultants in order to discover creative techniques for launching as well as sustaining their business.