The Scientist as Consultant: Building New Career Opportunities

  • Carl J. Sindermann &
  • Thomas K. Sawyer
Plenum: 1997. Pp.341 $29.95, £18.15)

‘Consulting’ is famously identified with someone who steals your watch to tell you the time and, in this era of ‘downsizing’, has become almost synonymous with ‘unemployed’. An exception to both calumnies is the technical consultant, especially the scientist. These are people who provide their expertise to many clients for a fee. But this book is not aimed at them, but rather at people who wonder whether consultancy is a career for them. Whether the career is right for you or not, the book is an excellent guide to help you decide.

What is a scientific consultant? The authors wrestle with this, and arrive at “a technically trained entrepreneur who makes available for a stated price his expertise, data, data analysis, evaluation and recommendations relevant to a client's needs”, a catch-all they admit is unsatisfactory. They also emphasize the need for professional ethics as a consultant, citing a quaintly pre-1980s definition of a professional as one “who maintains a loyalty to a code of ethics that transcends his or her loyalty to the rest of the organisation” or to themselves, a tenet which, if adhered to by major consultancies, would send several of them bankrupt.

But above all the consultant is a business person, and consulting is a business. Consultants must be interested in the processes of both business and science. This means accepting the value of lawyers and accountants as advisers, sending off bills promptly and harassing clients who refuse to pay them, and ‘selling’. Most scientists are unused to selling anything except ideas and, if you are not keen to try, then consultancy is not for you. Most consultancies fail, the authors believe, because of lack of aptitude for and interest in business. Squaring this with the Sisyphean task of keeping technically current requires real entrepreneurship. Scientific consulting is not just ‘a job’.

The authors describe a rewarding career path from paid hobbyist to professional manager, which you can join or leave at will. They examine what sort of people might flourish in consultancy and why, how to escape from it, what the future is, and how people change, succeed or fail. They also give substantial detail on what consultants actually do. (The section on managing scientists is excellent — a ‘must’ for department heads as well as industrial managers.) The book is stuffed with useful comments and guidance, including a very honest (if rather short) section on the downside of consulting. Consultants will enjoy putting names to the list of “clients from hell”.

My only serious disagreement is with the authors' perception of big consultancy companies. Graduate entry to a large consultancy is not a viable route to a career in scientific consulting. Scientists are the drudges in such organizations, and do not rise to the top without radically altered goals; the leader of the ‘science division’ in one such consultancy publicly commented early in his post that research and development were a waste of money. Nor can they leave to set up on their own, as the competition clauses in their employment contracts will prevent them from competing as a consultant with their erstwhile employer. The route to scientific consultancy is clearly science first, consultancy later.

The book has a strong US bias, and ‘rest of world’ seems to mean not Europe but Africa. That said, non-American readers can easily sidestep the few parochial discussions.

This is a business book, because consultancy is a business. But, like science, the book is full of facts and hard detail, and does include the negative controls of business or scientific failure. It is an excellent guide to a fascinating career choice.