As a self-employed, solo consultant, I am responsible for the entirety of each of my projects from start to finish. This includes: talking to clients about potential projects, designing a project with scope and costs that meet the clients’ needs and resources, doing the research/drafting the report(s), and of course any administration (reviewing/signing contracts, invoicing, etc). The bulk of my time is spent on the projects themselves and depending on the project may involve many client meetings (or none), research (primarily online), occasionally travel (though not since COVID hit), and drafting all reports. Most of my work is computer-based – I find my data on the internet through a variety of free and paid sources.

No - I have worked with many scientists who turned to consulting and I have never encountered a situation when having completed a postdoc gave someone a competitive advantage in salary, role, or non-research capabilities. I suspect my answer would be different if I were in a more technical role or worked more closely with groups doing basic research.

When you’re applying to your first consulting position out of a Ph.D. program or postdoc, the hiring manager knows that you will need to learn the business concepts but they value you for your transferable skills. I recommend highlighting communications skills (especially translating between technical and non-technical audiences), an ability to work independently or as part of a team, comfort with large datasets as well as with pulling up and seeing the “big picture”, and any other skills that make you unique or that you are particularly good at. If you have experience leading teams or managing/training junior team members, that is always worth highlighting. I will note that I have heard complaints that “PhDs can’t pull up out of the weeds to see the big picture” so any evidence you can give to the contrary will help. (Obviously I disagree with this assessment!!)

What consulting types tend not to care about – how much you’ve published or where you’ve published. They also don’t typically care about your technical skills.

Consulting in general is a balancing act between giving your client what they ask for (i.e. what they think they want) and giving them what they need. A good consultant does the former while gently guiding their clients towards the latter. Strong listening skills, patience, clear communication skills, and the ability to multi-task (i.e. juggle multiple unrelated projects at once) are all really helpful.

If you’re interested in my Competitive Intelligence (CI) work, then it’s also helpful to be comfortable with ambiguity (both in the available data and in an uncertain future), be resilient to ever-changing data, and be good at pattern recognition. If you stay in biopharma and want to move towards a commercial (i.e., sales / marketing / patient access) role, CI is unusual in that your comfort with technical / scientific data will be quite helpful.

Another way to think about this question is “what are the characteristics of someone who loves this work?” In my experience, people who love consulting are innately curious people who love to learn new things and who feel the most job satisfaction when helping other people. The most common reason people leave consulting is because they are tired of sending advice off into the ether and want to be able to make business decisions directly rather than advising the decision-makers.

Currently I’m a one-person company so I’ll answer this from the perspective of my last job at a big company, Genentech, and my prior job at a small consulting firm. In both of those positions, applicants would submit resumes which first went to either the internal HR staffing team (Genentech) or the hiring manager (WWMR). All resumes would be reviewed and those with the most promise would be chosen for a phone interview. Depending on the situation, there would be 1-3 phone interviews followed by in person interviews (4-10 depending on the company and the situation). Typically, there will be only one day of in-person interviews, but it’s not unusual to be asked to do a follow up quick visit or phone interview with one or two more people. If the interviews go well, the hiring manager will then call the applicant to inform them that the process is moving forward and get permission to call references and run a background check. When I was a hiring manager, I never did a reference check/background check unless I was pretty much ready to extend an offer. Finally, when all of that was done, I would call the applicant to discuss a verbal offer, do any negotiation around salary/role/hiring bonus/etc at that time, and then HR would issue a formal written offer based on what I had agreed to with the applicant.

Currently, none because I have no employees! When I was at Genentech, we regularly hired international employees as the company was open to sponsoring work visas. Only once did I hire someone who was living overseas – the relocation package took a little time to figure out, but we made it happen. We never had any international applicants at my smaller consulting firm so it’s harder to answer for that situation, but my guess is that we would have welcomed someone who was a permanent resident, but we would not have been able to cover the costs of sponsoring a work visa because we were a much smaller operation.