The Inside Track on Consulting – A Fireside Chat with Geordie Guy
The role of a Consultant can be different things at different businesses. In certain companies, Recruiters are referred to as Consultants, in other businesses a Consultant can be a full-time temporary employee, or even an expert in a specific field.
Here at Telstra Purple, our consultants are the front-line professionals, who deliver projects and outcomes for our customers. The projects that our consultants work on are varied and correspond with their individual expertise. Depending on our client’s needed, we can usually pair them with a consultant with specific experience and knowledge in that area.
The benefit of this is that our customers don’t need to find talent, hire them past when they are necessary, and essentially, they outsource entire projects to us and we provide the people, who bring purpose to technology (hence our company’s name, Telstra Pur-ple).
First up is Mr. Geordie Guy, a Senior Infrastructure Consultant who’s been part of our Sydney team for almost 3 years, and is an expert in Cloud Automation. Geordie comes from Tasmania, is the proud father of a child genius, and a very spoilt cat! When he’s not at work he loves to cook up a storm, cheer on his son’s Basketball team, and has been known to crack out his 3D printer to make bespoke objects and spare parts!
Rather than me explaining Consultancy entirely in my own words, I sat down with Geordie to get his insights, which I’m pleased to share below:
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Q: What was your pathway from high school to Telstra Purple?
GG: Probably a little atypical. I initially studied Law at university, and soon dropped out to go study network engineering at TAFE instead. After that I did a bunch of Networking and Systems Engineer roles that got more senior and more cloud-focused as I progressed through my career, eventually landing at Telstra Purple to follow my automation dreams.
Q: How would you explain your job to a 5-year-old?
GG: I make suggestions to computers about how other computers can make apps (ideally) without too much manual effort from me!
Q: How is consultancy different to a traditional, full time gig?
GG: Consultancy is amazing. It’s like a series of jobs that you enter, wow everyone with your skills, then quit, and go do it all over again! You still belong to core team back in the Telstra Purple office, and you also have the opportunity to grow in different areas on each client engagement.
Q: What do you like about your role?
GG: Firstly, the people I work with are really smart, and deeply interesting. I also love the regular, ongoing benefits and perks that we receive as part of the Telstra family, along with the interchangeable benefits of working with a particular customer at any given time. I’m “having my cake and eating it too” by being part of a mid-sized team that work on awesome stuff, inside a large and well established organisation.
I’ve worked as a Consultant for some of the biggest companies in the world, and didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as I enjoy Telstra Purple. In my experience, larger companies tend to discuss and proport to hold strong values like work/life balance, they in reality those beliefs were just posters on the walls and weren’t actively lived every day. Here at Telstra Purple, we don’t just talk about values, we walk the walk!
Q: Any downsides to working as a Consultant at Telstra Purple? Do you ever wish you were working in a more traditional model, where you are a staff engineer at your company, and stay working on the same product for months or years?
GG: Purple has so many opportunities to do cool stuff it can be hard to prioritise. That’s a great problem to have, but it’s still tricky. I’m also challenged sometimes with the fact we’re so enabled and leading edge, that it can be hard to go out onto customer sites and lead them on that journey with their tools and processes. We get there in the end though.
Q: What else are you passionate about, besides your job?
GG: I was born to cook and am paid to code! My idea of a simple weeknight meal for my family is chicken strips pan-fried with Korean pepper paste with a lime-seasoned slaw and drizzled with mayonnaise in wraps, or maybe a crunchy Vietnamese noodle salad.
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It’s difficult to summarise the role of a Telstra Purple consultant in under 800 words, but I hope that this article will give a little more insight.
If you, or someone you know like the sound of Geordie’s role and would like to become our next Telstra Purple consultant, please visit our career’s site here or get in touch with me directly at [email protected].
