Marc Kimpel is only years, but has more than ten years of professional experience as an IT consultant. Even during his training as an IT specialist, he was involved in projects with customers and “every project member is a consultant because customers always have questions,” says Kimpel. Consulting is fun, which is why he became an IT consultant at his employer after completing his training. What sounds very simple is practiced a thousand times over in the IT industry: anyone who understands technology and can talk well becomes a consultant. It’s that simple – even though the job is one of the most important in IT companies.

For jobs and vacancies in the IT industry, see also the job market on heise online:

Kimpel works at Consol , a family-run company with headquarters in Munich, with several branches also abroad and around 280 employees. The company has three business areas, one of which is its own software solution: an enterprise process management system that is used to digitize and control business processes. In this unit Consol 42 has employees, twelve of them are IT consultants, Kimpel is one of them.

A current project is about a help desk system. Sales took care of the customer’s request first, when technical questions came up, Kimpel came along. “I listen to the customer’s requirements very carefully and clarify whether we can cover them and, if so, how.” As a consultant, he must quickly understand the customer’s problem, including which goal is to be achieved.

Consistent consultation Consultation is a continuous process during a project in which the specification of the solution has the greatest need for consultation. In the help desk project, questions need to be clarified such as: Who should be notified of which event and how, or within what period of time does the person notified have to react?

“The crux of the advice is that the Customers often don’t know what they want and they are not familiar with their own processes, “says Kimpel. A second problem: two of the customer’s employees usually sit at the table, the IT manager and the department manager in which the system is to be used. One is familiar with the technology, the other has an organizational problem.

“An important part of my work is the transfer service so that everyone at the table gets along,” says Kimpel. As a consultant, he is responsible for ensuring that a solution works as recommended. “If that doesn’t work, you’re the bogeyman,” says Kimpel. But if it works and the customer gets involved in the project, he feels that he has done everything right. This is his confirmation of good work.

Learn to be a consultant, be a consultant Kimpel learned advice through on-the-job training at his employer. “We have a mentoring program for young professionals in IT consulting,” says Kai Hinke, Kimpel’s manager and head of the division. The young IT consultants learn from senior consultants in projects, carry out their own test projects and only when they are fit in consulting do they take on real projects.

For Hinke, a competent consultant is someone who is not blindly translates required requirements, but optimizes and automates processes with his solution. “You need technical and methodical knowledge, should be empathetic and strong in communication,” says Hinke. Today, consultants no longer have to travel a lot, as they used to, because most things are clarified on the phone or in video conferences, even in normal times, without Corona.

Marc Kimpel could have an IHK degree as an examined Make IT consultants, because a completed training in an IT profession is a prerequisite. Operative Professionals is the name of this public law training course that prepares you for a middle management position. There are four of them for IT: systems, business and marketing managers and IT business consultants. All four training courses together have around 500 participants attended in Germany last year, most of them as IT business managers and only 80 to the consultant.

“We had only one participant last year at the Stuttgart Chamber of Industry and Commerce, “says Claudius Audick, Head of Vocational Training. The training profile is good, but the possibility is largely unknown. That’s why so few interested parties. The qualification takes between half a year and a year, depending on the provider, is done part-time and costs around 5 280 Euro.

Study IT Consulting Degree programs with a focus on IT -Consulting is not even a handful in Germany. “This is because in IT technical competencies are considered to be the most important and instruments for consulting are considered unnecessary, after all, customers say what they want,” says Professor Martin Selchert. He is head of the Master of Science course in business informatics, with a focus on data science and consulting at the University of Economics and Society in Ludwigshafen. Selchert knows the consulting business very well: Before his current position, he was a consultant at McKinsey in strategy consulting for IT companies for seven years.

“It is a fallacy that customers actually know what they want “says Selchert. But when consultants assume this, unrealistic goals arise, and therefore frustration on both sides. Competent advice saves you from that.

The students learn competent advice in this course. The approach: Consulting is not a profession, but a way of working. The strategy: understand the problem strategically and at all levels of goals, organization, people and IT. This requires methods and techniques that train these skills. The solution: Design Thinking is used to develop a business idea. With the methods of business model development, this becomes added value. Then modeling and programming follow. Change management ensures that the system solutions are valuable for the users.

According to the compensation platform gehalt.de, an IT consultant with three years of professional experience earns around 52. 280 euros per year. That is even a few hundred euros more than the highly sought-after and highly paid IT security specialists.

( olb)