You Don’t Need A FAANG On Your Resume To Get Clients As A Data Consultant
It might feel like you need a FAANG on your resume to break into technical consulting, especially when you see that two live events are coming up, with ex-FAANG employees as the focus.
Now don’t get me wrong, technical consultants who have worked at a FAANG do have a unique selling point. But I have seen many consultants with no fancy degree, YouTube channel, or ex-FAANG on their LinkedIn land clients.
I wanted to take a moment to both encourage my readers and provide some tips on how consultants without a FAANG on their resume can and do land clients.
Build Trust By Showing Competence
When you look at individuals who have a FAANG on their resume, it may, to some, act as social proof. Whether that’s right or wrong is not the point. There are plenty of ways you can show you are good at the skills you have without having a fancy university or job on your resume.
In particular, I like the idea of sharing your experiences in various formats as a method to show that you are an expert in a specific technology.
And what’s great here is there are so many ways to do that!
Be the Expert
At the end of the day, the focus of a consultant is not just to sell their time but to sell their expertise. Clients hire you because they often need a skill or task that isn’t done often. For example, large migrations, green field projects, and vendor selection for tools like embedded analytics are all done infrequently. Thus, they look for someone or a team that has performed this task over and over again.
Even if they knew the path forward, they’d still likely want to hire someone to execute it because ideas are cheap and execution is always difficult. Thus, the meme above. The truth is that giving away advice is a great way to start becoming an expert.
With the ability to scale your advice using the internet, you can share your information freely. It’s an excellent way to become what is often discussed as a trusted advisor. Even before you land a client. You can build that social proof that you know what you’re talking about.
Find Niches Where You Can Be Helpful - Airflow, dbt, Trino, Oracle, and so many other technologies all have strong communities. There are thousands of people in these Slack channels that often need help. You can be the person that provides said help, whether it be through just answering simple questions or maybe sharing an article you wrote (although that second one can become a little annoying unless it’s really hard to explain your thinking in a few sentences). But slowly, you’ll become the person who knows the technology well, and when someone needs consulting help, they will call you.
Create The Go-To Guide - There are so many missing guides out there or something like the Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Now I say that with no affiliate link. What Joe and Matt did was take the thousands of articles, opinions, and experts and distilled it all into one book. To be clear, your guide doesn’t need to take two years to put together. You can have a bunch of experts help write a guide. Or perhaps a more niche aspect of data engineering, like the data engineering guide for healthcare. You can cover key metrics, key data models, how to handle HIPPA, etc. There are so many gaps in knowledge that are really just in people’s minds. Be the expert.
Find Opportunities To Talk Online or in Person- There are so many podcasts that exist today that need voices and experts to share their experiences (and it shouldn’t just be the same talking heads speaking every time). So it’s worth reaching out to technical podcasts and seeing if they’d be willing to have you on as a guest. And if you’re brave enough, you can look for conferences or technical groups that need speakers. My first talks were horrible. I generally finished 30-minute talks in 10 minutes and I don’t really think I provided as much value as I should have. But yet, people still wanted to talk to me afterward and hear more about my thoughts.
Find Well-Established Consultants and Work With Them - Another great way to gain experience and improve the trust others have in you is finding other consultants or social media voices that you can partner with. Perhaps you can write articles with them or help them with some of their projects. To be clear, I don’t mean myself. There are so many great consultants out there that you can work with!
Don’t Forget Linkedin - LinkedIn can be a noisy place filled with people telling you how they fed a dog, and it leads them to getting a job. But there are individuals on LinkedIn who are starved for real and helpful information. It’s a great place to provide your advice at scale. Yes, your first few posts won’t get noticed. Maybe your first hundred won’t (or at least it’ll feel that way). But you’ll likely find an audience if you continue, especially if you can find a unique perspective that helps enlighten people on a subject.
Be The Expert
Over time, you’ll find other ways to share your expertise. Perhaps you’ll offer free consultations, provide your own free webinars, put together case studies, etc. So don’t feel like you need a FAANG job to land clients; there are so many ways technical consultants land clients.
What will be your method?
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Also, don’t forget to check some of my past articles!