Senior consultants tend to have more responsibilities than consultants, so they can spend more time away from home working with clients. Consultants usually work from home or from an office, but they can also travel to meet with clients. The difference between a principal consultant and a senior consultant is in the area of responsibility and oversight. A senior consultant manages junior analysts and consultants, while a principal consultant oversees large teams that carry out an entire project.
A senior consultant is a business professional whose primary function is to advise corporate leaders and executives on ways to improve the overall business model, relationships with customers or employees, or other facets of daily operations. Sometimes, their main objective is to solve specific problems, or they may be hired to improve efficiency and reduce overall costs. This type of professional typically works for a business consulting firm and often serves as a member of a larger consulting team. It is also possible for people with a lot of experience to work as freelancers.
Daily work can vary greatly depending on the industry and the desired objectives, but in most cases the work focuses on helping business leaders achieve certain results and on providing external, unbiased advice. Before applying for any consulting position, you should be well aware of its structure and future trajectory. You can get this position in the job offer if you have 1.5 to 2.5 years of experience before consulting. Management consulting is unlikely to be a good option to change your career with more than 10 years of experience, as you will have to start all over again.
A senior consultant is usually someone who has specialized knowledge in a specific sector and is able to provide not only advice, but also demonstrable guidance. That's why high-ranking leaders spend most of their time networking, connecting with CEOs, and selling consulting services (projects). People who have a lot of consulting experience sometimes decide to work on their own, usually as freelancers. In consulting projects, there are only three levels: they roughly correspond to job titles, with slight variations here and there.
Senior consultants who work in consulting firms often work full time and often put in long hours a week, but the nature of their projects often changes with some frequency. In projects, consultants are not experts in all fields, but rather act as content ambassadors between customers and the real experts from different support centers around the world. What a senior consultant brings is experience and special competence or knowledge of a particular market environment. You can think of a senior consultant as a piece of the puzzle and a principal consultant responsible for putting the puzzle together.
A consultant who holds the “senior” position usually spends a lot of time working in a particular industry, to the point that he knows the ins and outs, and his experience is often considered very valuable to people who cannot see the “big picture” or do not have the time or resources to make general judgments about how the company works.
