Four Reasons for choosing a Consulting firm

It's very rare that you find people having aspirations to join a service organization, a consulting IT firm. The marketing and media space that product & startup companies get is completely disproportionate and it gives a biased knowledge to choose the company you want to work with. I wanted to list top 4 reasons of why you can choose a service organization based on my 20 years of experience in Service/Consulting IT organization

1. The biggest single differentiator is that you have so many options in terms of domain, technology, clients, landscape, location, work pressure that you can choose from. If you are short of motivation, you can choose to select a project that helps you to get that motivation as a combination of these factors. If you work in a service organization that values people a bit even, this is a huge differentiator, advantage to work in Service companies. Consider your career of 20-30 years and you will find that it was 'rich' in experience.
2. The ability to consult clients - if you are someone who likes expressing, have good empathy and like to take your clients on a journey- service organization is a gold mine that one can hit. Consulting clients would mean that you to understand the mark, the stakeholders, their needs, plan a journey with them to transform their organization, have craft in your function, negotiate many more. Initially this could be a pain, but when you do it often, you hit a flow that gives you joy to transform clients by your consulting.
3. Holistic Landscape - Even if you are stuck in a project for couple of years, you have a great community that does lot of different things and hence the 'universe' that you live in is very rich and not narrowed to certain group of technologies constrained by the products that one builds. Not just employees, clients come in with great domain, tech knowledge which gives you reasons to connect & share knowledge.
4. Strategic Alignment - This may not appeal when you are young, buried in IDEs- but once you get to consult more, you realise that there is a huge need to have strategic alignment with the client in terms of organization structure, initiatives, deciding roles, focusing purpose based capability improvement - why care about all of these ? There is a sense of dynamism in all of these things - as these are not one time changes, but something that you constantly align, understand, realign , shift things. This reduces the ennui that sets in with 'static' structures in the organization.