The first skill of a consultant.......

Hmm.... there are so many skills thats consultants need but after observing consultants for about a year now I can safely say that the most useful and cherished skill is WRITING! For the most part I've been doing a hell of a lot of writing since I got into consulting a little over a year ago. I got a small taste of that when I used to do a lot of projects for one of my former employers with tons of documents flying everywhere with instructions on how do crap I designed.

This doesn't compare to the amount that I've done recently. In college I could pull 10 page papers out of thin air and I must say that this skill has come in handy. There are numerous status reports, deliverables, etc etc etc that need to be produced weekly while at a client and it only gets worse as time goes on. The better it looks, the more they want. It almost comes to a point where you're doing more crafting of bad ass power points than actually writing down instructions on how someone should perform their new job or document what they did to help someone on the phone. But the point is that writing skills are very essential to the business world. Whether you're in consulting advising mega corporations or part of a small company, being able to convey your point of view and selling an idea or telling a story on how good or bad things are going are paramount in my view. This may be more important than the advanced quantum physics you took in college. While also important (well only if you're going into NASA or something), if you actually discover something being, able to tell people about it is what gets you recognition and gets you even more work and funding to find the next best thing or to tell an even more compelling story in the future.

So my grand advice to the masses (that don't read my blog) is when you get the chance, brush up on your writing skills. This more than anything will help you in your career. Anyone from admins to CEO's need this skill to advance themselves and their agendas to the masses to make more of the lean green (or whatever color they use these days for paper money in other countries other than the USA). I'm guessing my next rant won't be about brushing up on bad ass skills to be successful in this fun world we live in. Maybe I'll talk about my Wii or something.... Super Smash Brothers Brawl anyone??? ;)