I had worked during my studies, but mostly in various odd jobs. I had not managed to land anything in my own field. Now I was almost a Master of Science with an IT-related degree, which sounded reasonably employable on paper. The problem was that my professional profile was rather generic.

I knew one thing: coding did not interest me. So, in applications, I tried to explain that I would perhaps like to do requirements work, analysis, or something else involving people. Not exactly a laser-focused career plan.

I also did not really know what I was particularly good at. From an employer’s perspective, I was one almost-graduated IT professional among many others. There were probably enough of us in the market.

Eventually, I got a job at the university. (I have written more about that part of my career here.)

Two years later, the same job market felt quite different. I had not become dramatically more experienced, but I had become much easier to understand.

Becoming Less Generic

In 2008, I moved from the university to Accenture and started my career in consulting.

During my two years at the university, I had worked in an enterprise architecture research project. I knew practically nothing about consulting, but at least I knew enterprise architecture in theory. I had also interviewed people in companies as part of the research and learned to write reasonably well.

And enterprise architecture happened to be in demand at the time.

I applied for an open position specifically as an enterprise architecture consultant. At the time, enterprise architecture was still a relatively new field in Finland. There were not that many people around with even theoretical knowledge of the subject.

The setup was very different from my job search two years earlier. I was no longer trying to convince an employer that I was generally smart, had a relevant degree, and could probably be useful in some vaguely defined IT role. There was now a specific need, and I had at least some relevant knowledge and experience for it.

This was probably one of the most important changes in my career. I had become easier to understand.

Instead of being someone who could perhaps do something in IT, I was becoming someone who knows enterprise architecture.

Of course, I was still a junior consultant. Knowing the theory of enterprise architecture and being able to sell and deliver consulting work to a demanding client are slightly different things. I had a lot to learn.

But getting through the door had become easier because there was a clearer reason to hire me.

Getting Hired Based on Actual Work

Five years of consulting changed the situation again. In early 2013, I joined a small Finnish enterprise architecture consultancy called Coala. I did not get there through a carefully optimized application or a heroic performance in a recruitment process.

After an evening event with people from a former client, one of their former representatives asked me to join. We had worked together several years earlier. He knew how I worked, apparently remembered me positively, and had since become one of the founders of Coala, which was only about a year old at the time.

People often say that employers will not come knocking on your door. In this case, it came reasonably close.

This was a different type of job search again. When looking for my first jobs, I had tried to show that I might be useful. When I joined Accenture, I had a specific skill that matched a specific need. Now someone had actually seen me work and wanted to hire me based on that experience.

That is a major difference. A CV is basically a set of claims about yourself. References make those claims more credible. But someone who has worked with you for months already has much better information.

This is also why I have become somewhat skeptical about networking as a separate activity. Some of the most useful professional connections are simply people you have worked with and left a good impression on.

Choosing the Employer More Carefully

My latest employer change in 2022 was different again. By that time, I had already written, among other things, a book about getting a job in IT consulting. That created a slightly awkward situation: I now had to see whether I actually believed my own advice.

The basic idea in the book was to first understand what you want, learn about different employers, create a shortlist, and only then start applying. In other words, job search should include quite a lot of choosing on the applicant’s side as well. So that is what I did.

I mapped potential employers, used my network, and made only a few targeted applications. Enterprise architecture consulting is not exactly a mass market, but that matters less when you are looking at a carefully selected group of employers. I also looked quite carefully at the companies themselves. For the position I eventually took at CGI, I got a recommendation from someone I knew.

By that point, the situation had almost turned upside down. I had a fairly good idea of what I could do and what kind of work I wanted. I was already employed. I did not have to find a job. I wanted to find a job that was sufficiently better or more interesting than the one I already had. That gives you a rather different mindset.

You start paying much more attention to what the employer actually offers, who you would work with, what the role really contains, and how the company operates.

Even the recruitment process itself becomes useful information. During the job search, I encountered IT companies that took more than a month to make the first contact, companies that simply never replied, and even one that ghosted me after several interviews. CGI, in comparison, had the best recruitment process of the companies I dealt with.

A bad recruitment process does not necessarily mean that the company itself is terrible. Large organizations in particular can have surprisingly disconnected processes. Still, when you have alternatives, you start noticing these things.

The Job Search Changes in Stages

Looking back, my own job searches have gone through a fairly clear progression.

At first, I was trying to find someone willing to choose me.

A little later, employers were looking for specific expertise that I happened to have.

After enough work experience, some people already knew what I could do. Instead of evaluating me from a CV and a few interviews, they had actual evidence.

Eventually, I reached a point where I could spend almost as much effort evaluating the employer as the employer spent evaluating me.

This is, of course, partly what seniority does. A person with 15 years of relevant experience has more evidence to show than someone applying for their first job. There is no clever LinkedIn trick that removes this difference.

But I think there is more to it than simply accumulating years. You can spend 15 years becoming very experienced at something that few employers understand or need. You can also remain difficult to categorize. Experience helps, but the market still has to understand what to do with you.

My job search became much easier when my profile became more specific.

A Few Practical Job Search Rules

My own job searches have changed a lot over the years, but a few principles have remained useful. Most of them are fairly simple. But that does not necessarily make them easy to follow.

Make Yourself Easy to Understand

Especially as an expert, it helps if people can quickly understand what you are good at. You do not need to limit yourself to one microscopic specialty for the rest of your career. I certainly have not. I have worked with different kinds of architecture, strategy, IT development, and consulting assignments.

Still, people need some reasonably simple way to remember you. For me, enterprise architecture became that thing. It gave employers and clients an easy answer to the question: Why this person?

“Experienced IT professional” may be technically accurate, but it does not help much when there are plenty of people with similar education and years of experience. A more specific expertise does. The specialty can also change during your career. What matters is that at least part of your experience connects clearly to a problem somebody actually wants solved.

Turn Your Work Into Evidence

Do work that makes people want to work with you again. This sounds almost insultingly obvious, but it has probably helped my career more than any job-search technique.

Clients have asked me back into new assignments, former clients have recommended me, and one eventually offered me a job. In consulting, credibility accumulates through actual work. Someone who has already seen you solve problems, deliver what you promised, and behave reasonably professionally has much less uncertainty about hiring you again.

Your current job is therefore also part of your future job search, even when you are not looking for anything. Good work leaves behind something more useful than another line in the CV: people who know what you can actually do.

Search Narrower, Not Wider

Once you have some experience and know roughly what you want, there is little reason to optimize job search for the number of applications. I would rather map the market first and create a shortlist.

Which organizations could actually offer the kind of work you want? Which of them fit your preferences? Who do you know there? What can you learn about the team, managers, clients, ways of working, and compensation before applying?

Different employers can offer very different working lives even when the job titles look almost identical. Ten well-considered companies are probably more useful than a hundred found through increasingly desperate scrolling through job ads. That is especially true if you already have a perfectly acceptable job.

Use the Network You Already Have

Networking does not have to mean networking events. Some of the strongest professional connections in my own career have simply come from working with clients and colleagues. If somebody has seen you do good work for months, that connection is usually more useful than exchanging business cards with 50 strangers.

I would also interpret “network” quite widely. Former colleagues and clients are obvious, but friends, people from hobbies, old study contacts, and family can also know something useful.

My recommendation to CGI came from a flying friend. We happened to have lunch at an airfield and talked about my job search. He mentioned that he worked at CGI, told me a bit about the company, and said there was enterprise architecture work there. CGI had not even been on my original shortlist. He then offered to recommend me. There was no networking strategy behind it. We were just having lunch.

That is probably my preferred form of networking anyway: know people through normal life, talk about what you do, and help each other when there is a reason to.

Use the Ability to Say No

Job search becomes quite different when you can walk away. That does not require enough money to retire or recruiters fighting outside your front door. It simply means that your current situation is good enough that a new job has to offer some real improvement.

That lets you look beyond the title and salary. What would the actual work be? Who would you work for? Would you like to deal with this person every week? Why is the position open? How does the company treat candidates during recruitment? Does the whole thing still sound attractive after you have learned a bit more about it?

You can also decide that an interesting company is simply not interesting enough.

The employer is making a choice, but so are you. The further my career has progressed, the more important that second part has become.

From Getting Picked to Picking

Eventually, the biggest question changed from How do I convince this company to hire me? to Do I actually want to work there?

You cannot skip directly to that stage. It takes some combination of expertise, experience, reputation, and a useful network. A bit of luck with choosing a growing specialty helps too—preferably one that is niche enough to make you distinctive, but not so niche that nobody is hiring for it.

But you can move in that direction. Become easier to understand. Do work people remember positively. Keep in touch with the people you meet along the way. And when you have enough options, use them.

Being able to say no to a job may eventually become one of your best job-search advantages.

🏗️ Also Into Enterprise Architecture?

My sister publication, Enterprise Architecture Transformation, recently passed 1,000 subscribers. I write there about the practical side of enterprise architecture: what works, what does not, how EA creates value, and occasionally about the work and career of an architect.

It is still a fairly niche subject, so 1,000 people voluntarily asking for more enterprise architecture in their inbox feels like a decent milestone. If that sounds like your kind of thing, feel free to subscribe.

📚 Related Reads from Expert Work by Design

If you found this useful, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

When a client offers something like this, you obviously take it into account. So we waited.

A couple of weeks passed. I sent a polite reminder. Then another one. At that point, I was becoming reluctant to keep chasing a client manager for something he had offered to do himself. Eventually, the material arrived: a single PowerPoint slide with, if I remember correctly, three boxes on it.

It looked like a few minutes of work. I do not think the problem was that those minutes were impossible to find even in a busy schedule. Something else had happened. The task had simply remained undone for weeks even though the person knew what to do and had apparently intended to do it.

I have seen many variations of the same thing. I need to be somewhat careful with examples from consulting work because of confidentiality. Individual organizations or persons should not be recognizable from my stories. But the examples themselves are hardly unusual.

We all have them. A decision remains open even though everyone has enough information to make it. A short email never gets sent. Someone does not reply to a Teams message that would take half a minute to answer. A document waits for one final review or is not even started. A project task sits on a Kanban board for months without progress. A development initiative appears on the agenda month after month without getting started.

Some of these are pretty small tasks, while other are larger. The common thing is that they are usually important to someone.

There should not be anything to stop them being done. People know what needs to happen. They are competent enough to do it. The tools exist. Often there is even agreement that the work is important.

Still, the work does not get done.

A Lot of Activity Can Mean Very Little Progress

Modern organizations have become quite good at organizing work around work. We have roadmaps, backlogs, task lists, portfolio views, project plans, status reports, steering groups, weekly meetings, monthly meetings, dashboards, and spreadsheets that have become important parts of the operating model without anyone necessarily intentionally designing them that way.

Most of that is useful. Complex work needs coordination, and people need to understand what is happening. Actually, I have spent a good part of my career helping organizations create exactly these kinds of structures, so I am hardly going to argue against planning, documentation, or governance.

But activity and progress are different things. I have been involved in projects where a topic was discussed extensively, workshops were held, material was produced, comments were collected, and the material was updated. Then someone suggested that the stakeholder group was too narrow, which was probably true. A stakeholder analysis followed, more people were invited, and additional views were collected. The material was updated again. Then someone identified another aspect that needed further investigation. Another document or two was produced, followed by several rounds of discussion, comments, and revisions.

In many cases, all of that was perfectly justified. The additional stakeholders genuinely needed to be involved, and the new perspectives and analyses improved the result. Each individual step made sense, and there were good reasons for doing the work.

Still, the schedule kept slipping. The steering group listened to the explanations, nodded in agreement, and approved the revised timelines. After all, each delay had a perfectly reasonable justification. But at some point, you start to get the uncomfortable feeling that the project is doing a lot of sensible things but may never actually finish.

That is particularly easy in expert work because preparation is often real and demanding work. Comparing alternatives, refining a plan, gathering input, preparing a decision, or improving a presentation may require considerable expertise. It cannot simply be dismissed as bureaucracy.

The problem starts when preparation continues after we already know enough to take the next sensible step. At that point, it all boils down to this: If we already know the next sensible action, what exactly are we still preparing for?

Making Work Visible Is Not the Same as Making It Move

One reason this can be difficult to notice is that we have become very good at making work visible.

Project management systems show what is planned. Task boards show what is in progress. Reports and dashboards show what is late. Portfolio tools show where money and resources are allocated. Status meetings make sure that problems are discussed regularly.

That is clearly better than having important work hidden in somebody’s inbox or memory. But visibility has its limits.

A task can be visible for months. Everyone knows that it is overdue. It can appear in every status report and be colored bright red on a dashboard. And still, nobody may do anything that changes the situation.

Sometimes even basic follow-up is missing. A task is assigned, perhaps with a deadline, and then largely forgotten until someone eventually asks about it. In other cases, progress is monitored regularly, but managers do little to address delays, resolve competing priorities, or make sure that somebody actually takes the next step. Reporting can become a routine in its own right, with remarkably little effect on what happens between meetings.

Making work visible, monitoring progress, and actually getting things done are three different things. The first is mainly about information and coordination. The second requires active follow-up and management intervention when necessary. The third depends on what actually happens between meetings. Neither of the first two produce progress by itself.

The Explanations Are Usually Reasonable

When important work does not move, there is rarely a shortage of explanations.

People are busy. Resources are limited. Priorities have changed. We are waiting for another decision. Someone is on leave. A customer issue appeared. The budget process took longer than expected. There was a reorganization, which in a large organization can explain quite a lot. Usually these explanations are at least partly true.

Work life also seems to be almost deliberately designed to make sustained work difficult. Calendars fill with meetings. Responsibilities overlap. Goals remain vague. People work on several topics at the same time. Immediate requests arrive throughout the day and often come with someone else waiting for an answer.

The environment simply kept producing other things to do first.

This is why explanations such as poor motivation or lack of discipline often feel incomplete. Of course motivation matters. But expert organizations are full of motivated and hardworking people whose calendars are already full and whose work contains several competing priorities.

Urgent work has a major advantage here: it usually arrives with a deadline, a meeting invitation, or an important person asking for something. But if work is just important, it waits much more quietly.

Maybe We Are Looking at the Wrong Part of the Problem

When work remains unfinished, we usually have two fairly obvious places to look for the explanation.

The first is management. Is the goal clear? Are priorities consistent? Do people have enough time and resources? Are responsibilities clear? Is management providing enough direction and removing obstacles?

These are all valid questions, and employees are often quite good at identifying problems in this category. Sometimes with good reason. Vague priorities, overloaded roles, poor coordination, and calendars filled with meetings can make focused work unnecessarily difficult.

The second explanation is the individual. Perhaps we simply do not manage our work very well. We procrastinate, organize ourselves badly, avoid difficult tasks, or fail to stay motivated. In less diplomatic language, somebody could just call that laziness.

This is also a familiar angle in personal productivity and self-help literature. The proposed solution is often better habits, more discipline, a smarter task system, time blocking, or some other method for getting yourself to do what you already know you should be doing. There is clearly something to this. Procrastination exists, and people differ considerably in how well they organize their work.

But both explanations can miss something in between: the structures around the work.

A task may have a clear goal but no natural place in anyone’s working week. A project may have an owner, but the owner also has fifteen other responsibilities. A decision may appear on the agenda repeatedly without there being a clear point when somebody is expected to make it. Something may remain an official priority for months while repeatedly losing to work that happens to be more immediate.

An organization can get many things right and still make important work surprisingly hard to complete. It can communicate priorities, assign owners, set targets, and track progress. None of these automatically creates the practical conditions for the work to happen. A quarterly goal is not a working rhythm. A named owner does not mean available time. A dashboard showing that something is late does not tell anyone what should happen on Wednesday morning to change the situation.

This is why I am increasingly interested in structures. By that, I mean fairly practical things: how work enters the calendar, how the next action becomes clear, when decisions are made, how people return to unfinished work, and what helps progress continue after the initial attention has moved elsewhere.

This is somewhat different from the usual management or personal productivity discussion. I am less interested in another prioritization model or the perfect task manager, note-taking system, and morning routine. There are already enough of those.

The question I find more useful is simpler:

What makes important work likely to happen—and keep happening?

I think there is enough material here for a few more articles. Starting with what these structures might actually look like in practice.

🧭 20 Years of Enterprise Architecture, 18 Years of Consulting

A while ago, I realized that I have now spent over 20 years working with enterprise architecture and 18 years in consulting. That is long enough to accumulate a fair amount of material, mistakes, and opinions.

I wrote a separate piece about that journey in my sister publication, Enterprise Architecture Transformation. If enterprise architecture, consulting, or how a career in both gradually develops and what I have learned sounds interesting, you can read it there.

📚 Related Reads from Expert Work by Design

If you found this useful, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

As it turned out, that has not been a bad starting point for an expert career. I have built a good career in consulting without becoming particularly loud or extroverted. In some situations, being quieter has probably even helped. Listening, preparation, and careful thinking are useful qualities in expert work.

However, there is an important condition. Being quiet should not mean keeping your expertise to yourself. If you have an important idea, see a risk, or know a better way to solve a problem, that expertise needs to reach the people making the decisions. Otherwise, its practical value is rather limited.

The larger problem is visibility. Organizations do not actively hunt for quiet talent. Your boss does not know what you do every day unless you tell them. Colleagues cannot recommend you for new projects if they have only a vague idea about your skills. And a client will never ask for you by name if nobody told them who actually built the analysis.

These are the the challenges. You do not need to become loud, but your work must be seen. The good news is that neither requires becoming someone you are actually not.

A Few Practices That Have Worked for Me

The interesting question is how you can contribute and make your expertise visible in practice without competing for attention all the time. Here are a few practices I have found useful.

Do Not Compete on Airtime

Meetings are an obvious place where quiet experts may start questioning themselves. Someone else speaks immediately, comments on almost every topic, and seems perfectly comfortable thinking aloud for 45 minutes. You may prefer to listen first and form your view before speaking.

There is no need to compete on airtime, but you need to contribute. For me, preparation has always been the easiest solution. Before an important meeting, read the material, identify the two or three things that actually matter, and think about the questions or recommendations you want to raise.

It helps even more if I have a clear role in the meeting: my own presentation, a specific section to cover, or a topic where people expect me to give my view. I find that much easier than trying to squeeze my point into the half-second pause between two managers who are already moving to the next topic.

One useful observation at the right moment usually creates more credibility than a long stream of generic comments. More importantly, it allows your expertise to influence the discussion. Over time, people also notice that when you speak, there is usually a reason.

That matters more as you become senior. A junior expert can spend much of a meeting listening and learning. A senior expert is expected to exercise judgment. If you see an unrealistic assumption, a project heading in the wrong direction, or a better alternative, saying so is part of the job. Careful thinking is valuable only if the useful parts leave your head at the right time.

Make the Work Visible

Many specialists dislike self-promotion, and for good reasons. Most of us know that specific colleague who seems to take full credit for every success in the company, maybe with minor help from seventy other people who actually did the work.

Real visibility requires much less theater. Show your own analysis when you have the chance. Share useful project findings with colleagues directly. Give a fifteen-minute internal demo on a solution that helped a client. Put your name on documentation when that fits the culture, and make sure the relevant stakeholders know the material exists.

External visibility helps as well. Writing a short blog post or sharing practical observations on LinkedIn simply documents what kind of problems you solve and how. Often, clients and peers outside your immediate team understand your thinking much better when they can read your thoughts directly in their own time.

It is not only about recognition. When you show your work, others can reuse it. A clear architecture model, an analysis template, or a lesson learned has little impact if it sits in a project folder forever. It creates real value only when others know it exists and build on it.

The same rule applies for your manager. Do not assume they track the details of your daily work. Tell them straight: this was my contribution, here is what changed because of it, and here is where I took more ownership.

In expert roles, a lot of the best work produces indirect results. You clarify an ambiguous decision, stop a dangerous dependency before it enters production, help another consultant unblock their task, or create a framework others can follow. So, quality work does not automatically speak for itself. Someone has to connect the output to the expert who created it. Usually, that person must be you.

Writing Works Particularly Well for Quiet Experts

Writing has probably been my most natural channel for building visibility. Live meetings tend to reward fast reactions and loud voices, while writing offers space to construct a good argument and explain what you actually mean.

It is also an effective way to put your expertise into the use without fighting for speaking time in every workshop. A well-written memo, analysis, Teams post, article, presentation or other deliverable can influence a decision long after the meeting has ended. You do not have to write a book to make an impression.

Based on my long experience in consulting, everyone in a meeting usually knows how to talk. Everyone also has opinions. What is often missing is high-quality documentation and crisp synthesis of the facts. Taking the responsibility to write that summary, draw a useful diagram, clarify the open issues on paper, or formulate the actual conclusion gives you leverage. It turns quiet analysis into the actual backbone of the assignment.

Over time, writing creates an expert profile. People start connecting your name with certain topics and problems, which can lead to new assignments, speaking invitations, professional contacts, and job opportunities. At the same time, useful ideas travel further than they would in a single conversation.

Writing also forces disciplined thinking and gives others something tangible to comment on. When an idea remains only spoken in a workshop, people easily talk past each other or agree without truly understanding. A written draft creates a concrete baseline for colleagues to review, challenge, and add on. It also applies on a personal level. I have sometimes believed I understood a complicated problem, only to realize during drafting that my idea was merely some loose assumptions leaning against each other. Putting thoughts into text exposes the weak spots before someone else does.

Network Through Actual Work

Networking is another concept that can make a quieter expert slightly tired. It easily brings to mind events where the main activity is approaching strangers and explaining what you do. Some people enjoy that. Good for them.

To my experience, useful professional networks are built through normal work. Clients, former clients, colleagues, former colleagues, people you have helped, and people who have helped you already form a network.

Do good work with them. Stay in touch occasionally. Have lunch or coffee when there is a reason. Connect on LinkedIn and help when you reasonably can. Long-term connections often survive on very simple traditions. For instance, with the architecture team from my very first consulting job, we still gather together at least once a year on the first of May.

These relationships are also important because expertise rarely creates value alone. People bring you into discussions, ask for your opinion, recommend you for work, and connect you with problems where your experience is useful.

In the end, it comes down to quality over quantity—or more accurately, usefulness over quantity. One reliable professional relationship is worth far more than thirty business cards collected from people you will never speak with again. You do not need to know everyone. You only need enough people who know what you do, trust your work, and remember you when a relevant problem lands on their table.

Over a long career, these relationships accumulate surprisingly well.

Reliability Matters More Than Noise

Visibility helps people know who you are. Reputation determines what they think when your name comes up.

For a quiet expert, reliability is a particularly strong foundation. Do what you promise. Prepare properly. Be honest when you do not know something. Follow through without constant supervision and make difficult things easier for the people around you.

This sounds almost disappointingly basic, but that is how it works. Senior expertise is not only about knowing more things. It is about becoming someone to whom other people can safely hand difficult problems and whose judgment they are willing to use.

Once people trust that you will take care of something, being quiet matters much less. Calmness can even become part of your professional identity: you listen before deciding, avoid unnecessary drama, and people believe you when you say something is under control.

That kind of reputation takes time to build, which is one more reason not to manufacture a louder and more impressive version of yourself than the work can support.

Find Your Own Visibility Mechanism

There is no single correct way to contribute and become visible as an expert. Someone enjoys conference speaking, another runs excellent workshops, someone writes, and someone else becomes the person colleagues call when a particularly unpleasant problem appears.

A more useful question than “How can I become more visible?” is “Where can I make my expertise useful and visible in a way I can sustain?”

If delivering a keynote to five hundred strangers completely drains your energy for forty-eight hours, you probably should not build your entire career trajectory around conference stages. At the same time, finding your own mechanism does not mean staying exclusively inside your comfort zone.

Speaking in front of an audience, appearing on podcasts, or recording video presentations does not come naturally to me at all. It requires conscious effort every single time. I choose to do it anyway, because I recognize the tangible value: it moves my career forward, gives credibility to my work, and, most importantly, provides practical help and new perspectives to the people watching or listening.

In any case, the visibility approach works better when it fits the person using it. But a quiet working preference should never become an excuse to stay outside the discussions where your contribution matters.

The organizational environment also plays a role. Certain company cultures heavily celebrate constant social presence and self-marketing toward leadership, while others value deep technical judgment and delivered substance. Some roles are built around stakeholder interaction; others allow long periods of independent work. You can develop your behavior, but you can also choose environments where your natural working style is useful.

Quiet Is Fine. Invisible Is Risky

I am still not usually the loudest person in the room, and I do not really want to become one.

Over the years, however, I have learned two things. Doing good work and hoping somebody eventually notices is not a very reliable career strategy. Neither is doing good thinking and keeping the useful conclusions to yourself.

Expertise creates professional value when it reaches the problems, decisions, and people where it can make a difference. Career value follows when people can also connect that expertise with you. That requires some combination of contribution, visibility, reputation, and relationships.

For a quiet expert, the answer is not to change your personality. There are just some good practices you can adopt. Speak when you have something useful to say. Bring forward the ideas that matter. Make your contribution visible. Write if writing suits you. Build relationships through actual work. Become reliably good at work that matters.

You can remain the quiet person in the room. Just make sure your expertise is part of what happens there.

📚 Related Reads from Expert Work by Design

If you found this useful, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

The reason for my recent office-heavy life is information security. A laptop provided by one client can only be used inside secured, access-controlled premises. So, I go to the office. I do not mind doing this. In some projects, client’s requirements simply dictate where the work must happen.

My work weeks vary a lot. In one week, I might visit two different client sites and my own company office. Other weeks, I work almost completely from home. That is typical in consulting. Projects change, teams change, and the most practical place to work changes as well.

In most of my projects, I am the only CGI consultant based in the Helsinki area. The rest of the team and client stakeholders are often located elsewhere. Because of this, going to my company office does not put me in the same room with the people I daily collaborate with. I simply join the same Teams meetings from a different location.

This is why the current debate about returning to the office is interesting to follow. I am definitely not against working from the office. However, I think organizations should focus more on what they actually want to achieve with office presence instead of just counting days.

Why Organizations Want People Back

Before the pandemic, I spent almost every working day either at the company office or at client premises. Going somewhere was simply part of working. Then the pandemic forced a very large remote-work experiment, and many knowledge workers discovered that a surprising amount of work could be done elsewhere.

Now organizations are trying to find a new balance, and there are understandable reasons for wanting people back.

Many of these reasons are easy to understand from an employee perspective as well. A company culture easily fragments if people never meet face to face. New team members need to connect with colleagues and learn how daily work actually gets done, including the informal practices that are never covered in onboarding slides. Quick, spontaneous chats help share information across teams. Managers also need genuine contact with their people outside of scheduled video calls.

For consultants, there is also another issue. If one spends years working closely with one client but rarely sees anyone from their own company, it is quite easy to become more connected with the client than with the employer. From the employer’s point of view, that is hardly ideal.

Then there are reasons that are more understandable from the management side than from the employee side.

Some organizations still struggle with remote leadership and consider office presence as a tool for control and visibility. I have even been told that it is smart to “show your face” at the office during uncertain times, because visibility might protect your job. There might be some practical reality behind this thinking, but I think it is a poor justification for demanding people to be at the office. Good management should know what employees actually deliver and achieve without needing to see them sitting at a desk.

The office is also sometimes treated as a general solution to problems related to culture, collaboration, or engagement, as if bringing people into the same building would automatically improve them. It can help, of course, but only if something useful actually happens there.

And then there is the office itself. Companies have invested considerable amounts of money in buildings, meeting rooms, services, and other facilities. Empty offices are difficult to justify, especially if the utilization rate is visible somewhere in management reporting.

So, there are some good reasons for bringing people together, at least from the management’s point of view. But these reasons are quite different from each other, and they do not automatically justify the same solution.

Counting Days Is the Wrong Thing to Measure

Hybrid work is often reduced to a simple number, whether it is a strict mandate or a recommendation: two days at the office, three days at the office, or maybe even four or five.

I understand why. A specific number is clear. It can be communicated in one slide, included in a policy, and measured afterwards. Badge data can tell exactly how many times you have entered the building.

The problem is that physical presence is only an input. It says very little about what happened during the day. A single number also generalizes across very different roles and types of work within the same organization. The reasoning behind the number can therefore be surprisingly thin. Often it seems to be based more on general assumptions about collaboration, culture, or productivity than on how people actually work.

One reason for this may be that senior management has a surprisingly limited view of what employees actually do during their working days and what their work requires. In a large organization, that is understandable to some extent. But it is still a weak basis for defining general, detailed rules on where that work should happen.

Take one of my typical workdays. I may have several online client meetings, some architecture modeling to do, and a document to write. If everyone I work with is somewhere else, going to my employer’s office changes very little. I commute there, find a desk, put on noise-cancelling headphones, join several Teams meetings, work on my deliverables, and commute home. The work is still remote. It just happens from the office.

An open-plan office can also be a rather poor environment for some expert work. Architecture analysis, concentrated writing, or six virtual meetings in a row do not automatically improve because there are more people talking about their own stuff somewhere nearby. But home is not automatically better either. For someone with limited space, children at home, or other distractions, the office may be the best place for concentrated work.

The situation is completely different when the right people are present at the same time. In some assignments and proposal cases, I work with a local CGI team. We sometimes arrange shared office days and workshops. These can be genuinely useful. We can look at the same material, discuss things without booking another meeting, draw something on a whiteboard, and occasionally discover that people have interpreted the same matter in three different ways.

The same applies to client workshops. Some things are just easier to solve around the same table.

This is the distinction I would like to make. An office day with shared work can create real value. An office day without shared work can easily become a remote workday with an added commute.

So, instead of starting with the number of days, I would start with the work. What do we need to accomplish? Who needs to be involved? And which location supports that work best?

Sometimes the answer is the office. Sometimes it is the client site. Sometimes information security makes the decision for you. And sometimes the best place is a quiet room at home.

Make Your Office Days Work

Employees do not usually get to choose the policy. If your employer requires two or three office days and monitors attendance, arguing endlessly against the policy is probably not the most productive use of anyone’s time. But you can still try to make those days worthwhile.

First, coordinate with the people you actually work with. Random office attendance creates random encounters. If possible, agree on common days with your team or other people you need to meet. Being in the same building becomes considerably more useful when someone relevant is also there.

Then move the right work to those days. Workshops, proposal work, architecture reviews, onboarding, mentoring, difficult discussions, and planning sessions are obvious candidates. Even one proper working session can make the trip worthwhile. The whole day does not need to become an eight-hour collaboration exercise. That would probably create a fairly strong demand for remote work again.

Use the informal opportunities as well. Have lunch with colleagues. Go for coffee with someone you have worked with online for months. Ask the small question that has not been important enough for a meeting invitation. These are minor things, but this is exactly the kind of interaction an office can provide much better than Teams.

At the same time, be realistic about the rest of the day. There will still be virtual meetings and individual work. Find a quiet room if possible. Do not schedule your most concentration-heavy task for an afternoon in a noisy open office if you can do it somewhere better the next day.

If the office requirement works particularly badly for your role, explain the problem in terms of the work. Saying that you simply prefer working from home may be true, but it is not necessarily a very convincing business argument. Saying that your required office day consists of six virtual client meetings while the rest of the project team works in other cities describes the situation much better.

The same applies to client requirements and information security. My current situation is easy to explain: I need to use a client computer on access-controlled premises. That is a concrete reason for being there, and it is directly connected to the work.

If attendance is monitored, I would generally follow the policy and then try to influence how it is applied. Discuss common team days. Point out conflicts with client work. Suggest exceptions when there is a real reason for one. Bring concrete examples instead of a general complaint about commuting.

A mediocre company policy can still result in reasonably sensible working practices if teams and managers apply it with some judgment.

And if the organization mainly cares about the badge statistics, then at least make the trip useful for yourself. Meet people. Take the lunch. Have the conversations. Get the free coffee (if it is good). There is little benefit in spending an office day alone behind headphones simply to produce one more green mark on somebody’s dashboard.

There is also a limit to how much energy it makes sense to spend adapting to a policy that simply does not fit your work or life. If the requirement feels unreasonable, you have raised the issue, and there is little room for flexibility, it may be worth considering whether another employer would suit you better. Sometimes changing the company is easier than changing your ways of working that already work well.

The Office Is a Tool

For me, the best hybrid-work model is based on purpose.

Some weeks, I may work almost entirely from home because my work consists of analysis, writing, and virtual collaboration. During another week, I may visit several offices because I have client workshops, team meetings, or information-security requirements. Both can be completely sensible ways to work.

The people closest to the work usually have the best information for making these decisions. The employee understands the tasks. The team knows when collaboration is needed. The client has its own requirements. The manager can coordinate these needs with the wider organization.

A top-down, company-wide policy is often decided by leaders who sit far away from daily reality. They understand the organization chart, but they do not know what my typical Tuesday looks like.

Organizations have good reasons to encourage people to meet in person. At the same time, employees have good reasons to value flexibility. These two goals do not need to contradict each other.

The office is just one work environment among many. It works very well for certain activities and poorly for others. We should use it when it brings real value. And when we do commute to the office, the day should be worth the trip.

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👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

In practice, this has meant constantly dropping into new organizations where I initially knew next to nothing. Not the business, not the people, not the internal jargon, not the technologies, and certainly not the history behind the problem I was hired to solve. Sometimes I had plenty of background documentation available. Other times I got an outdated slide deck and the name of one person who supposedly “knows how things actually work around here.”

Consulting is a strange industry. It has its own habits and internal theater that are probably best kept inside it. But I still think almost any knowledge worker can borrow a few good ideas from how consultants work.

The reason is simple: consultants are constantly thrown into unfamiliar environments. You are expected to make sense of a messy problem fast, work effectively with strangers, and deliver something genuinely useful before the contract runs out. That kind of pressure forces you to build some very practical working habits.

What You Can Learn From Consultants

Here are a few things I think almost any expert can learn from consultants. None of them are complicated, but that does not mean we always follow them in practice.

Think About Value, Not Only the Task

It is easy to focus on producing the report, analysis, application, presentation, or whatever was requested. A consultant has to think one step further: what will the client actually do with that? A technically excellent deliverable can be almost useless if it answers the wrong question.

The same applies inside an organization. Before starting, it is worth asking who needs the result, what they are trying to achieve, and what decision or action the work should support. This small shift in perspective is surprisingly important in deciding what is actually worth doing.

Be Reliable

Consulting makes reliability very visible. If you promise something for Thursday, deliver it on Thursday. If you find that is impossible, say so early. Write down what was agreed and follow up on open items.

None of this is exciting, but people remember surprisingly well who makes their work easier and who creates additional work. Reliability is one of those qualities that rarely gets much attention when everything works, but becomes very visible when it is missing.

Prepare a Little More Than Necessary

Consultants regularly enter meetings where they know much less about the topic than the people around the table. There are no shortcuts to make it easier for the consultant. But preparation helps. Understand the purpose of the meeting, identify the main questions, and bring something concrete to discuss.

A rough diagram or three slides are often better than starting from an empty screen. People find it much easier to correct something than invent the whole answer together. Even a simple “laughing version,” as we sometimes call it here in Finland, can give the discussion a useful starting point.

Ask Better Questions

Consultants rarely know everything about the client organization, especially at the beginning of an assignment. Good questions are therefore one of their most useful tools. Instead of immediately offering an answer, it often makes sense to ask what is really happening, why it matters, who is affected, and what has already been tried.

That is useful in almost any expert role. A few well-chosen questions can save hours of unnecessary analysis or work. They can also reveal that different people are actually talking about slightly different problems, which is surprisingly common.

Do Not Accept the Problem Definition Too Easily

A client may ask for a new application, report, process, or automation. An experienced consultant usually wants to understand why. Sometimes the requested solution addresses only the visible symptom.

That does not mean questioning every assignment or trying to make everything more complicated. It means understanding the real problem before investing serious effort into solving it. Sometimes the best contribution is simply helping to frame the question better.

Bring Structure to Complicated Things

Consultants are often brought in when a topic is messy, unclear, or simply too large to handle. Therefore, one useful skill is to give the problem some structure: identify the main parts, separate what matters from what does not, and make the relationships visible.

It is easy to add more detail. The harder skill is deciding what can be removed. Management usually does not need every technical detail behind a recommendation. They need to understand the situation, the options, and the consequences. Being able to turn a complicated topic into a clear structure, picture, or recommendation is useful in almost any expert role.

Take Notes and Make Decisions Visible

A surprisingly large amount of organizational work disappears because nobody remembers exactly what was agreed. Consultants tend to write things down and share the notes with others, because otherwise projects become difficult very quickly.

A few lines about decisions, responsibilities, and open questions are often enough. Good notes also help when people change roles, somebody joins the work later, or the same topic comes back after a few months. That is much better than having the same discussion again a month later.

Produce Something Useful Quickly

Internal experts can easily spend a large part of their week in meetings, discussions, and coordination. Some of that is necessary, but it is also possible to be very busy without producing much that moves the actual work forward.

Consultants usually have less room for that. The client is paying for the work and expects to see progress. It creates a useful habit: produce something concrete quickly. It can be a draft, analysis, diagram, recommendation, or even a short list of decisions and next steps. It does not need to be perfect. Having something on the table makes progress visible and gives others something they can react to, improve, or use.

Learn to Show Your Expertise

Consultants have to make their expertise visible because somebody is paying for it. Internal experts can benefit from the same mindset. It is useful to be clear about what you know and what kinds of problems you can help solve.

Keep your professional profile current, write about topics you know, maintain your network, and make your areas of expertise visible. Good work matters, but people also need to know that you can do it.

Keep Developing Your Skills

Consultants feel changes in market demand quite directly. If your skills become outdated, finding the next assignment becomes harder. Other experts face the same issue, but sometimes with a longer delay.

It is useful to occasionally ask yourself what you are good at now, what is changing in your field, and what you should know a few years from today. There is also value in deciding what you do not need to learn. The supply of new tools, methods, and certifications is effectively unlimited, while your time is not.

The Practical Side of the Consultant Mindset

None of these skills are unique to consulting, and that is kind of the point.

Good consultants get good at ordinary working habits mostly because the feedback loop is short. If you misunderstand what the client actually wants, they will notice it from the final deliverable. If you show up to a workshop without preparing, everyone in the room sees it. And if you promise something for Friday and send it the next Wednesday, the client is not going to forget that.

The same goes for communication and learning. In consulting, you have to explain technical or complex matters to people who know very little about it, turn messy conversations into clear next steps, and learn fast because the next project will be completely different. These are just good, practical habits for any expert.

You do not need to work in consulting to use the parts that actually make sense: think about the outcome before jumping into the work, prepare properly, write and speak clearly, deliver on time, and keep your skills up to date.

In any case, you can safely ignore the rest of the consulting nonsense. Nobody needs a 74-slide deck when six slides do the job. A packed calendar does not mean you are doing good work. Speaking confidently for ten minutes is not the same as having something useful to say. And not every simple concept needs a 2x2 matrix and a made-up acronym.

💼 Learn More About Consulting Skills

Want to go deeper into consulting, client work, and growing your career? I cover all of this in my book Successful Technology Consulting: How to Become a Top Dollar IT Consultant, the second book I ever wrote.

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👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

I have been lucky because money has not been a big source of stress for me for almost twenty years. There are always enough other things to worry about.

Part of the reason is simple: I have had a successful career in consulting and I earn a relatively good salary. Income is important. One good career move can have a much bigger financial impact than spending years trying to save money on small things like coffee. Still, I have not always earned a high salary.

Income is only one part of the story. And the reason is not that I live very cheaply, either.

I live in the center of Helsinki. Aviation is one of my hobbies, but writing is actually even more expensive for me: I work four days a week mostly because I want to have time to write. This means I voluntarily give up about twenty percent of my potential salary. I also have a family, so we live quite a normal everyday life.

What has really helped me is a simple financial system that I have used for a long time.

Money Should Buy Options

I find saving much easier when the money has a purpose. For me, that purpose is freedom.

A decent investment portfolio gives you options that salary alone does not. You can survive a few months between jobs. You can turn down work that does not make sense. You can accept a somewhat lower-paying job if it is otherwise better. And eventually, it may allow you to stop working for a salary before reaching the rather absurdly high official retirement age.

You can also work less if you want. That one is very real for me. Every Friday I could be billing a client instead of writing. Over a year, the financial difference is significant. Still, I consider it money well spent.

The fifth day has allowed me to write books, articles, and short stories and gradually build another career alongside consulting. I am effectively buying time for myself.

This has also changed how I think about purchases. The useful question is rarely just “can I afford this?” With a good salary, the answer is often yes.

A better question is whether I value the purchase more than the other things the same money could eventually make possible.

Most Months Should Be Boring

My investing system is not complicated. Salary comes in. Normal life gets paid for. I keep some cash available. A meaningful part of what remains goes into investments. Then I repeat the same next month.

I do have a long-term financial target: eventually, I want working for money to become optional. I also have a fairly lightweight investment strategy to guide how I get there.

These days, there is very little exotic about the investments themselves. Most of my money is in ordinary listed stocks and ETFs. I am not constantly looking for the next interesting asset class, the latest fashionable momentum stocks, or some investment that requires a sufficiently capable language model just to explain where the return is actually supposed to come from.

I also do not try to reinvent my investment strategy every few months. I just keep doing roughly the same sensible things. The boring repetition is the strategy.

That is surprisingly similar to my work. A good career is rarely built on one brilliant project. You make sensible decisions, deliver what you promised, improve your skills, and repeat the process for years. Personal finances work quite the same way.

Higher Income Only Helps If You Keep Some of It

During my consulting career, my income has increased considerably. I have specialized, taken on more difficult work, changed jobs a few times, become more visible in my field, and gradually increased my market value. That has probably done much more for my finances than any spending optimization.

Of course, it is perfectly natural for spending to increase as income grows. You may want a somewhat nicer home, travel more, eat out more often, or simply make everyday life a little easier. I have done all of these myself.

The problem starts when spending grows almost automatically with income. A slightly nicer apartment becomes a larger one. A better car becomes an even better car. More expensive holidays become the new standard. Restaurants become ordinary instead of occasional. Small upgrades gradually turn into necessities.

I occasionally find myself quietly amused when someone earning more than I do complains about not having enough money. It is a good reminder that income alone does not solve much if spending keeps expanding to absorb it.

The useful part is keeping some distance between income and spending. If your salary increases by 1000 euros, there is nothing wrong with spending some of that increase. But if your monthly spending immediately increases by the full 1000 euros, very little has changed financially.

If part of each increase remains unspent and gets invested for the next ten or twenty years, quite a lot can change.

Spend on Things You Actually Care About

I am not particularly interested in minimizing my spending. I like living where most things are close. I eat lunch out regularly. I travel. I fly. And I deliberately give up consulting income to write. These are expensive choices, but they are also choices I care about.

Still, caring about something should not mean being financially careless about it. Even expensive choices can usually be optimized. Living in the center is costly, but I have never felt the need to buy the most expensive home I could afford. Flying small airplanes is not cheap, but I have found ways to keep the hourly costs at a reasonable level.

At the same time, I am relatively indifferent about many other things. My car is old enough that depreciation is hardly a major concern anymore, although it is of a quality brand and I intend to keep it for a long time. And I honestly cannot remember when I last bought any significant consumer electronics. I also rarely use taxis or home delivery services. I have healthy legs, and quite often walking or cycling works perfectly well.

Clothes are much the same. I do not spend much on them, but I buy things that fit me well and work for the occasion. I have even bought a tailcoat when I needed one, although that one was second-hand. That probably sums up my approach quite well.

I could afford to upgrade many of these things more often. I just do not get enough additional value from doing so. This distinction has been more useful to me than detailed budgeting.

Spend properly on things that genuinely improve your life. Be much less enthusiastic about the rest.

A Buffer Is More Than Emergency Money

I also keep enough cash available. Financially, cash can look inefficient compared with investments. In practice, it buys you time.

That is convenient, if a washing machine breaks. But if you want to leave your job, it becomes much more important.

Many career decisions become easier when the next salary payment is important but not critical. A buffer gives you time to find a better assignment, change jobs, take a break, or simply avoid making a bad decision because you need money immediately. That is one reason I do not try to invest every available euro.

I Mainly Track the Big Numbers

I know people who track almost every euro they spend. They know roughly what they have spent on different things each month, and if they want something extra, they consciously decide what they will spend less on to make room for it.

My approach is less ambitious. I want to know roughly how much I am investing, how the portfolio is developing, how much cash I have, and whether my overall spending still seems reasonable. If these numbers look fine, I see little reason to investigate every invoice or receipt.

Financial administration should solve a problem. I already have enough hobbies.

Eventually, Money Becomes Boring

After following roughly the same system for years, money has become surprisingly uninteresting in everyday life for me.

I still think about larger financial decisions. I follow my investments. Markets go up and down, and some years are more expensive than others. But I do not need to think much about whether I can afford normal life.

More importantly, money already gives me options. I can work four days a week. I can spend money on flying. I can make career decisions based on more than the next salary payment.

Eventually, I would like working for money to become completely optional. On paper, that is a financial goal. In practice, it is just as much a goal about time.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If you found this useful, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

That core has stayed surprisingly stable. What has changed is everything that has gradually grown around it.

Over the years, my work has expanded into areas such as identity and access management (IAM), sales and proposal work, broader business consulting, and, more recently, practical AI. Some of these have become important parts of my professional toolkit. Others are supporting skills that simply help me do my main work better.

There was never much of a grand career plan behind this. Usually, a client assignment, a business need, or plain curiosity pulled me into something new. I learned enough to get the work done, studied some more, talked with people who knew more than I did, and gradually added another layer to my expertise.

Looking back, the most useful expansions in my career have had one thing in common: they have connected to something that was already there.

Broad Expertise Needs a Clear Core

I think broad expertise works best when there is a clear specialization underneath it.

There is certainly a market for generalists. At least many people deliberately position themselves that way. Generalist is also a relative term. I have sometimes been called a generalist architect because I work across business, information, application, and technology perspectives instead of focusing on something narrower, such as Azure architecture. At the same time, enterprise architecture itself is clearly a specialization when you look at business and IT consulting as a whole.

Both approaches can work. I have just always believed more in the power of having a recognizable specialization. I wrote about this in a previous article.

The risk with spreading yourself too widely is that your professional profile starts to get difficult to explain. You know something about strategy, cloud, data, AI, project methods, cybersecurity, and a handful of software products. Those are all useful things. But when someone asks what you are actually good at, the answer may take a surprisingly long time.

In my view, expertise needs something to attach to. There should be a recognizable core: a field, a type of problem, or a context where people know what to call you for.

For me, that core has long been enterprise architecture and, more broadly, making sense of complex organizations and change. I tend to look at the whole, figure out what actually matters, and make it understandable to other people. Enterprise architecture brings those things together: the big picture, the important connections, and a practical way to work with change.

The other things I have learned over the years sit around that core. They make it broader and more useful, but the core still gives the whole thing some shape.

With a clear core, new expertise has somewhere to go. And somewhat paradoxically, a clear specialization can make it easier to expand rather than harder.

Build Around What You Already Know

The most useful expansion usually happens close to the problems you already solve. A new skill should help you take on a wider role, understand a client problem better, work with new stakeholders, or deliver something you could not deliver before.

My IAM experience is a good example. IAM is a large field with its own technologies, processes, operating models, and specialists. It never became my main area of expertise, but I can still contribute to IAM-related assignments when needed. More importantly, it taught me how roles, identities, applications, data, security, and governance work in real organizations. That became another layer around my architecture expertise.

The same applies to proposal work and learning about the business of consulting. Understanding how consulting is sold, scoped, priced, and delivered helps me shape assignments, discuss options with clients, and turn an idea into something that can actually be bought and implemented. And, to be fair, it also helps with visibility and career opportunities. Sales and proposal work puts you in front of more clients, colleagues, and leadership and can open doors to new roles and responsibilities.

An architect who understands customer needs, decision-making, commercial realities, organizational politics, and implementation constraints can usually contribute much more than good models alone.

That is what deliberate expansion is about. The useful question is not only what you should learn next, but what that knowledge allows you to do.

Choose What to Learn

Professional development is also about choosing where to spend your time and attention. There will always be another framework, tool, platform, methodology, certification, or trend you could learn. The harder question is: which ones are actually worth going deeper into?

I find it useful to think about skills at different levels:

• What do I want to become genuinely good at?

• What should I know well enough to use in real work?

• Where do I mainly need to understand the language and basics?

• What can I comfortably leave to others?

• Which new skill would strengthen what I already do well?

This is a more useful way to think about development than simply counting courses or certifications. Certifications can be valuable, of course, but completing one does not automatically mean you can use the skill in practice.

For me, AI is an area I have deliberately decided to explore at a practical level. I already use it in consulting and writing, which means I can learn through actual work rather than only through courses or theory. I want to understand the tools that are relevant to me well enough to use them effectively, question their outputs, and see where they genuinely improve the speed, quality, or impact of the work. I do not need to know every technical or theoretical detail, or have a strong opinion on which model is best.

Different skills also play different roles during a career. Some become part of your core expertise. Some strengthen that core. Others are useful tools for a particular project or period and may later become less important. For example, a broad generalist IAM architect profile may be less in demand today than it once was, while more specialized IAM skills have become more valuable.

Knowing how far to go with each skill is a professional skill in itself. You do not need to learn everything. You need to make good choices about what is worth learning deeply, what is worth understanding, and what you can safely leave to someone else.

Learn Through Real Work

I have to admit that I am fairly skeptical about training. Most courses I have attended over the years have been moderately useful at best, and the really good ones are surprisingly rare.

Training can give you concepts, terminology, examples, and some structure. That can be useful. But the things that matter most in expert work are usually learned by actually doing the work, making mistakes, seeing what works, observing how others do it, and discussing the difficult parts with people who have done it before.

Judgment develops in real situations with incomplete information, deadlines, clients, consequences, and people who may not agree with some neat theoretical model.

A new task → quick orientation → practical experience → observing others → reading or training → discussion with more experienced people → reflection → a slightly more difficult task.

The order matters. Once you have tried something in practice, you know what you do not understand. A book, course, or discussion suddenly becomes much more useful because you have real questions instead of just a pile of new concepts.

I try to practice new skills against a real need whenever possible. I do not draw architecture models just to practice drawing architecture models. I create them when there is an actual need for that. I approach AI in much the same way: rather than inventing exercises for myself, I use the tools for real writing, consulting, analysis, or other tasks and learn from what happens. I would recommend the same approach to others.

You can study a topic for months and still be quite lost when facing the first real assignment. Real work exposes the gaps quickly.

Mentors Show What Works in Practice

Mentors have played an important role in my development, especially in consulting and enterprise architecture. A good mentor can show you things that are surprisingly difficult to learn from books, courses, or even your own work.

They show how experienced people actually approach a problem: what they pay attention to, what they ignore, which questions they ask first, and when the work is already good enough. They can also help you reflect on your own work afterwards: what went well, what you missed, and what you should try differently next time. You still need to do the real work and make the occasional mistake, of course, but a good mentor can make that learning considerably faster.

I learned much of the practical side of developing an enterprise architecture practice during my time at Coala, a boutique enterprise architecture consultancy. There are surprisingly few good opportunities to learn that by doing, and the only public training courses I know on the subject are organized by that one company. You can study methods and frameworks for sure, but building a working enterprise architecture practice inside a real organization is a different challenge entirely. You need someone to show what work in real life.

This is how I have learned most of the skills that have mattered in my career: doing the work first, then using training, reading, mentors, and reflection to get better at it.

Expertise Has to Meet Demand

A skill becomes professionally valuable when it helps solve a problem that someone actually has. For consultants, that is especially concrete: ideally, it is also a problem someone is willing to pay to solve. The same basic logic applies to most expert work.

Personal curiosity still matters. It keeps learning interesting and often points you toward useful new areas. But professional development works best when curiosity meets some real demand.

There should be an overlap between what interests you, what you can become good at, what supports your existing expertise, and what organizations actually need. This does not mean jumping after every fashionable topic that appears on LinkedIn.

It means paying attention to how work is changing and where one additional skill could make your existing expertise more useful. Often, the best next capability is not a new profession at all. It simply helps you solve a more relevant problem.

Writing Expands Your Thinking

Writing has become one of the most useful ways I develop my expertise. Articles, presentations, books, and newsletters make your thinking visible, of course, but that is only part of the value.

The main reason is simple: writing forces you to check whether you actually understand what you are talking about. Trying to explain something clearly is a good test of whether you really understand it. Weak spots become visible surprisingly quickly once you have to put an idea into words.

It also pushes you to learn more. While writing, I often notice gaps in my knowledge, look into them, and come back with a better understanding than I had at the start. Just as importantly, writing helps develop your own thinking. You start connecting ideas, questioning assumptions, and forming clearer views of your own.

Publishing adds another layer of quality assurance, although the feedback is not always delivered in the most diplomatic way.

Avoid Random Growth

There is nothing wrong with learning from whatever projects and tasks happen to come your way. A lot of professional development happens exactly like that.

The problem is when, after a few years, you have collected a lot of experience but it is hard to see where it is taking you. A new client industry. One technology, then another. A transformation program. A tender. A new tool. A certification. Then the next assignment.

You have learned plenty. But what is it building toward?

One question I find useful is this:

What does this new skill connect to, and what could it help me do a few years from now?

You do not need a big career strategy. But having some direction helps. Your professional profile will change over time, and that is part of the process. What matters is having a rough idea of where you want to go and what you want to build on along the way.

Build Around What You Already Do Well

Expanding your expertise should make your professional profile stronger, not harder to understand.

The idea is not to leave your core behind. It is to build around it. You keep solving the problems you are known for, but gain more ways to approach them. You understand more of the surrounding business, can work with a wider range of people, and can contribute in more parts of the work.

This matters when you are looking for a new role or assignment too. A clear core helps people quickly understand what you are good at. Broader skills then show that you can do more than one narrowly defined task.

That is usually more useful than trying to present yourself as someone who can do a bit of everything.

For me, enterprise architecture is still the core. Around it, I have built experience in consulting business, proposal work, writing, broader business consulting, and practical use of AI.

Together, these skills make the core more useful and open up new possibilities.

📘Build Your Senior Expert Career by Design

I explore these themes further in The Senior Expert Career Playbook, a practical guide to developing your expertise, building visibility and influence, and creating a sustainable, fairly compensated expert career without moving into management.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If you found this useful, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

Often, I did not even have concrete goals to review. Or the targets were so vague that you could not really tell what success was supposed to look like. That ambiguity was quite convenient, as it gave the review board the freedom to decide for themselves whether the goals had been met or not.

My goals are more practical these days. Still, I have come to realize that most professional growth does not happen in the annual review meeting. Instead, it comes from hands-on work in client projects, taking on new responsibilities, helping with proposals, doing some business development, and sometimes, just plain luck. The annual review might point you in the right direction, but you build your career in the everyday work.

Still, taking a moment once a year to look back at what you have achieved is valuable. The problem is that these chats tend to look backward too much, focusing on what happened and how the year went before everyone runs back to their actual work.

Because of this, I have made a real effort over the last five years or so to push these conversations toward the future.

I am preparing for my own review once again, which means doing the usual self-assessment. It is always a tricky balance of being honest, ambitious, positive, realistic, modest, and impressive all at the same time.

The process means looking at the goals from a year ago, trying to remember what we actually meant by them, and digging up the notes you hopefully kept along the way. From there, you put together a good story about your achievements and write down a new set of goals that might or might not be relevant in January.

Despite its flaws, the annual review can be an useful tool. It is one of those rare, formal moments when you can discuss your performance, skills, responsibilities, next projects, career path, and pay all in one setting. But there are certain good practices to consider to make the most of the meeting.

Start With What Changed Because of You

Your manager may be smart, observant, and generally pleasant. However, they still do not fully know what you do, what you have achieved, or what you want next. That is particularly true if you work in consulting, where your work can be spread across various clients, projects, teams, proposals, and internal activities.

Expert work also creates value in ways that are difficult to measure. You may clarify a confusing situation, prevent a poor architectural decision, reduce project risk, help a colleague complete difficult work, rescue a proposal, or gain the confidence of an important client. These contributions matter, but they do not always appear neatly in neat metrics such as financial figures.

Even highly visible outcomes can hide your individual contribution. The final presentation features the company logo rather than your name. The manager may receive the credit, as often happens. A decision looks obvious only after someone has done the work to make it look obvious. A serious problem that was successfully prevented is particularly difficult to present as an achievement.

That is why preparation should start with value rather than busywork. Simply being busy is a weak career argument, although many organizations still treat busyness as a minor religion.

Instead, identify the important problems you solved, the decisions you improved, the risks you reduced, the responsibilities you accepted, the people or clients you helped, and the revenue you brought in. Include feedback and concrete outcomes wherever possible.

For example, whenever I take part in a proposal, I briefly describe my role and the outcome of the case. When I receive positive feedback, I forward it to my manager and include it in my annual summary. Otherwise, nobody may remember it six months later, including myself.

Numbers help when they mean something. For many consultants, billable hours are a critical metric. I have also found it useful to compare my annual billing with my salary. It is a simple calculation, but it provides a clear indication of how well your salary reflects the value you bring to the company.

For sales professionals, the crucial metric is sales, for obvious reasons. I also count the proposals to which I have contributed and estimate their total value. These metrics do not explain everything, but they are far more useful than general impressions.

Ultimately, the goal is to help your manager understand and appreciate the work they did not directly observe.

A useful question to ask yourself is this:

What changed because I was involved?

Check Whether Your Role Has Already Changed

Annual reviews often assess performance inside the current role. Did you meet expectations? Did you achieve your goals? Did you demonstrate the company values listed somewhere on the intranet?

These are all reasonable questions. But they miss an important one:

Is this still the same role I had a year ago?

Expert roles tend to expand quietly. You begin supporting sales, mentoring colleagues, working with more senior client representatives, leading parts of assignments, handling difficult situations, developing internal practices, or taking ownership of something that never had an official owner.

One additional responsibility looks small. Ten of them can create a different job.

This is one reason compensation can fall behind the actual work. Responsibilities change continuously, while titles and salaries move through formal processes. One system updates every week. The other may have a committee meeting once a year.

Compare your current work with the role you originally accepted or the expectations discussed in the previous review. Look at complexity, autonomy, influence, judgment, and consequences.

Doing more of the same work does not automatically make the role more senior. Handling broader problems independently, influencing larger decisions, and carrying responsibility for other people’s success are stronger signals.

Your manager may see parts of this development. They probably do not see the full accumulation unless you explain it.

Separate Expertise, Responsibility, and Results

Expertise, responsibility, and results are connected, but they are not the same thing.

Expertise is what you can do. Perhaps you now understand enterprise architecture more deeply, facilitate difficult discussions better, know the client’s business, use AI effectively, or handle complex stakeholders with less drama.

Responsibility is what others trust you to handle. You may own a larger workstream, advise senior people, mentor colleagues, represent the company, or make decisions with wider consequences.

Results are what the work produced: better decisions, successful deliveries, reduced risks, stronger client relationships, improved practices, sales, or new capabilities.

The strongest career argument is that all three have developed together:

I can do more, I am trusted with more, and my work produces more value.

That is more convincing than saying you worked hard and deserve recognition. The useful question is what the work amounted to.

Give the Next Year Some Direction

An annual review should produce more direction than “keep up the good work.”

That feedback is friendly, but it leaves the direction undefined. You continue responding to whatever projects, client needs, proposal cases, and internal gaps appear, doing what seems necessary at the time.

The organization keeps receiving your contribution, while your role expands through accumulation rather than intention. A year later, you may be doing a rather different job without anyone having decided that this was the plan.

In my case, some of my recent goals have been development goals in a fairly practical form. One has been to build practical AI skills. Another has been to gain experience from new industries and clients. They are concrete enough to guide the year, although you cannot control everything yourself. You can study a new industry, but you still need a suitable client assignment. You can develop your AI skills, but the exact opportunities depend partly on what happens around you.

Practically, the AI goal has included using AI responsibly in my work, acting as an AI champion in my unit, learning more about AI-assisted development, guiding and training others, and supporting the direction of AI use more broadly. I have gradually moved from being someone who mainly uses AI in his own work to someone who also helps others use it and takes part in planning where it should be used and how.

That is the kind of change a development goal should make visible. It should describe more than a topic you plan to study. It should say something about how your work and responsibility are expected to change.

So, discuss what should happen next. What responsibility will you take? What expertise will you deepen? What kind of assignments should you seek? What evidence would support the next role or compensation level? When will progress be reviewed? Also decide what the new focus replaces. Otherwise, role development becomes just workload development.

Keep the plan small. Choose one or two concrete changes that can become visible in actual work. A 90-day cycle may be more useful than a grand annual plan: select one area, define a concrete responsibility or behavior, and review what happened after three months.

Discuss Compensation Directly

A compensation discussion should sound like a compensation discussion. Do not hide it inside comments about motivation and future opportunities. Your manager may leave thinking you had a productive career discussion, while you leave wondering why the subject you cared about never appeared.

You can bring it out directly. For example, you can say:

“Over the past year, my role has expanded in these specific ways. I would also like to discuss whether my compensation still reflects the responsibility and value of the work.”

Connect compensation to expertise, responsibility, and results rather than to effort or personal need. Show where the work has become broader, more demanding, or more senior. Where useful, compare it with the next career level or similar roles in the organization.

Your manager may not be able to make the decision in the meeting. There are salary budgets, approval processes, and review cycles, especially in large companies.

You should still leave knowing who makes the decision, what evidence is needed, what the timeline is, and when the matter will be discussed again. “Let’s return to this later” is not a timeline.

Prepare One Page

Even a 10-slide presentation is usually excessive for an annual review. One page is usually enough.

Use the categories required by your organization’s HR system, but make sure you cover the following five things:

• What value did you create?

• How did your role change?

• What can you now do better?

• What should happen next?

• What decision is needed about your responsibilities, role, title, development, or compensation?

Review the goals from the previous cycle as well. Some were achieved. Others may have become irrelevant or been replaced by more important work. Real work does not always respect the categories created twelve months earlier. Explain what happened instead of quietly ignoring the goals.

Send the summary to your manager before the meeting. This gives them time to prepare and reduces the risk that half the discussion is spent reconstructing your year from calendar entries.

After the meeting, document the decisions, expected evidence, and next check-in. Annual reviews produce surprisingly little unless someone writes down what was agreed.

Make It Useful

Many people treat the annual review as a workplace ritual that simply needs to be completed. Fill in the form, have the discussion, click the correct button, and continue with the real work.

That is understandable. An annual review does not advance your career by itself. It is only a meeting, and often a rather predictable one.

Still, you can get something useful out of it. You can make your contribution visible, examine how your role has changed, agree on what should happen next, and discuss compensation directly.

For senior experts, career progress rarely comes from one spectacular achievement. It is usually the accumulated result of expertise, responsibility, trust, visibility, and useful outcomes. The annual review is one place to make that accumulation visible and decide where it should lead.

It may remain a ritual. But at least it can be a useful one.

📘Explore the Topic Further

The annual review is just one of part of a larger question: how do expert careers actually move forward?

I explore this question in more detail in my Senior Expert Playbook series.

The Senior Expert Career Playbook looks at how expert careers develop in practice: how you build a position and help others understand the value of your work.

The Senior Expert Pay Playbook focuses on compensation. It explains how pay is shaped by perceived impact, trust, role, and organizational dynamics—not only by performance or one successful salary discussion.

The basic idea behind both books is simple: doing good work matters, but so does making that work understandable.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If you found this topic interesting, you might also enjoy the following articles:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

A small update about this newsletter.

When I started IT Consulting Career Hub, the focus was exactly what the name suggested: IT consulting careers.

Over time, the writing has naturally expanded. I have still written about consulting, but increasingly also about expert careers, visibility, influence, compensation, meaningful work, role shaping, sustainability, and how important work actually gets done in complex organizations.

So the newsletter is getting a new name:

Expert Work by Design

The domain will stay the same for now, and you do not need to do anything.

The new name simply reflects the direction the newsletter has already been taking. It is still for consultants, architects, specialists, advisors, and other knowledge workers. But the focus is now broader than IT consulting alone.

I will continue writing practical, reflective articles about how to build an expert career.

Thanks for reading along so far.

– Eetu

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

You look at your task list, calendar, inbox, client promises, internal projects, unfinished notes, half-written documents, and the meeting you accidentally accepted for your last afternoon before vacation. Then you think: I can still finish most of this.

This is usually the moment when reality quietly leaves the room.

Expert work has a way of expanding until it fills all available space. There is always one more thing to clarify, one more comment to answer, one more document to polish, one more person to help.

Much of it feels important, because much of it probably is important to someone. The problem is that your brain does not care whether the pressure comes from a strategic initiative, a customer escalation, or a vaguely worded Teams message from someone who “just needs a quick view.” It all becomes the same pile.

Before a longer holiday, the goal is not to empty that pile. The goal is to leave it in a shape that does not attack you when you come back.

This is not about the basic holiday checklist you may get from your employer. Yes, set your out-of-office reply. Mark your calendar. Tell the relevant people when you are away. These are useful things, and someone in HR has probably already written them down.

But for experts, the harder part is not the automatic reply. It is deciding what needs to be closed, what needs to be handed over, what needs to be documented, and what can simply wait without anyone pretending otherwise.

Do Not Try to Finish Everything

The classic mistake is to treat the last working days before a holiday as a heroic productivity sprint. It may sound responsible, but it is often the opposite.

When you try to finish everything, you usually finish the easy things, touch the important things too lightly, and leave the difficult things in a more confusing state than before. You also start your holiday with your head still full of unfinished sentences, unresolved questions, and small worries that follow you like badly trained dogs.

A better approach is to decide what actually needs to be finished before you leave. Some things are truly time-critical. Some things need a handover. Some things can wait. Some things have only looked urgent because they have been sitting in your inbox with a red flag, which is not the same as importance, even if Outlook has strong opinions about it.

This is a useful career skill in general. Seniority is not only about being able to do more. It is also about knowing what deserves your attention now, what needs to be delegated, and what can safely survive without you for a while.

Make Your Absence Boring

A good absence is boring. It means your colleagues know what is going on. Your clients or stakeholders know who to contact. Your documents are good enough to be understood without you narrating them live. Open decisions are visible. Risks are named. Nobody has to become a workplace detective because you disappeared with half the context stored only in your head.

It does not require a ceremonial handover package with a logo, version history, and three appendices. Usually a clear note is enough: what is done, what is open, what needs attention, who owns the next step, and where the relevant material is. Basic stuff. Which is also why it is surprisingly rare.

For experts, this is one of those invisible professionalism things. People may not praise it loudly, but they notice when it is missing. A messy handover creates friction. A clear one creates trust. Trust is built in moments that are often too ordinary to look impressive.

Leave Notes for Your Future Self

Your future self is also a stakeholder, although a poorly represented one.

Before a holiday, everything seems obvious. You know why a decision was made, what the next paragraph of the report should say, which file contains the correct version, and what the customer really meant in that slightly confusing meeting. After two or three weeks away, this confidence may have vanished completely. You return rested, which is good, but also strangely uninformed about your own work.

Write notes for the person who comes back. Not polished documentation. Just enough context to restart without spending half a day digging through chat messages and calendar entries. A few bullets in the right place can save a surprising amount of mental effort.

They also reduce the temptation to check work during the holiday “just to remember where things were.” That is how the door opens. Then one message becomes three, and suddenly you are reading a steering group deck next to a lake.

If you read my previous article on context switching, you can probably guess how I handle this: calendar blocks. Before I leave, I book short slots for my first days back and add the necessary notes directly into those calendar entries. Nothing fancy. Just enough context to remind myself what I was thinking before my brain switched context.

Protect the First Day Back

The first day after a holiday should not be treated as a normal working day. Technically it is one, of course. Emotionally and cognitively, it is closer to restarting an old machine that has been unplugged for a while.

That is not weakness. It is just how attention works. Like AI solutions, expert work depends on context, and context takes time to reload.

Before you leave, try to protect at least part of your first day back. Use it to read your notes, check what changed, look at priorities, and rebuild a realistic plan. Avoid turning it into a full day of back-to-back meetings, especially meetings where you are expected to be sharp, current, and charming. Two out of three may already be ambitious.

That kind of small buffer makes the holiday more useful. You can actually disconnect, because you know there is a planned re-entry. Without that, the last days of vacation easily become a slow mental return to work. The laptop stays closed, but the brain has already logged in.

A Holiday Is Part of the System

Experts often talk about recovery as if it were a personal wellness hobby. Something nice, preferably done after all serious work has been completed. That is a strange idea, because serious work never ends.

A sustainable expert career needs rhythms. Intense periods, quieter periods, learning, delivery, reflection, and proper time away. Without these, the work may still continue, but the quality starts to decline in ways that are easy to explain away. You become less patient, less curious, and less able to see the whole picture. You still answer messages quickly, so everything looks fine from the outside. A beautiful metric, and almost useless.

The pre-holiday reset is not about becoming a perfectly organized person. That would be a lot to ask, especially before summer. It is about leaving work in a condition where other people can continue, your future self can return, and your holiday has a fair chance of doing what holidays are supposed to do.

So before you log off, do the useful minimum.

Finish what truly needs finishing. Hand over what others need. Write down what you will forget. Protect your first day back.

Then leave.

The work will still be there when you return. It may sound depressing, but it is also comforting. Your career is not built by pretending you are always available. It is built by doing valuable work over time, with enough judgment to occasionally close the laptop and let the system run without you.

🏖️ A Small Summer Break

On that note, I will also take my own advice and log off for a while.

This newsletter will now go on a summer break. The next post will come out around mid-August, when laptops have been reopened, calendars have started making noises again, and the idea of “just one quick meeting” has returned from its natural habitat.

Until then, I hope you get a proper break as well. Not a fake break with email checking, half-open Slack, and “I’ll just read this document once.” A real one, or at least the closest available version.

See you in August!

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

Looking back, that now feels like a luxury product.

These days, my work looks different. At the moment, my personal record is seven billable assignments at the same time. Most of them are for different clients. Different organizations, different goals, different people, different tools, different problems, and naturally, different ways of explaining why the same three things are urgent. On top of that, there is proposal work, administration, internal development, and all the other small things that seem to increase quietly in the background.

That is consulting. At least one version of it.

The hard part is not only the workload. It is the switching. One moment you are discussing enterprise architecture governance with one client. Thirty minutes later you are co-modeling a process for another. Then you work on an offer. After lunch, you design solution architecture for a third client. Then comes an offer review meeting. At some point, there is a quick internal discussion where someone asks, “Do you remember what we agreed with the other client?”

Of course you remember. You are a professional.

You just need a few seconds, your notes, and possibly a small miracle.

The Problem Is Not Having Many Things to Do

Having many things to do is normal. Most professionals live with that. The real problem is having many different contexts that all require a different mental model.

Each assignment has its own internal logic. The client organization has a certain way of making decisions. The project has a history. Certain people are important, even if they are not officially important. Some topics are sensitive. Some words mean one thing in one organization and something completely different in another.

This is where context switching becomes expensive. You cannot just jump into a meeting. You have to reload the environment in your head.

What is this client trying to achieve? What did we discuss last time? Who was worried about what? What was I supposed to deliver? Why is this diagram called final_final_v3, and why do I already know it is not final?

Your brain cannot really multitask. It can switch quickly between things, but each switch has a cost. The previous topic does not disappear politely when the next one starts. It stays in the background, making small noises. Meanwhile, the new topic expects full attention immediately.

Some people are naturally better at this than others. They seem to move from one client to another with very little visible loading time. I am not sure whether it is a skill, a personality trait, or just better acting. In any case, context switching can also become harder with age. At least I have noticed that I appreciate my notes more now than I did earlier in my career.

Build External Memory

The first survival mechanism is simple: stop trusting your memory.

It is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you have learned something about consulting and possibly human biology. When you work with several clients at once, memory becomes unreliable. You may remember the substance, but forget the context. You may remember the decision, but forget who made it. You may remember that something was urgent, but forget whether it was actually urgent or just said in an urgent voice.

I write things down. A lot of things.

Usually I write them down almost as I hear them. Manually. I do not use a sophisticated personal knowledge management system with tags, graphs, and a weekly ritual. I mostly use Notepad++. It is not beautiful, but neither are most meeting notes. The point is to capture what was agreed, what remains open, who owns what, and what I need to do next.

I do this regardless of whether an official memo is required. A meeting memo is for the project, the client, or the wider group. My notes are for my own ability to continue working without reconstructing the whole situation from memory. These are related things, but they are not the same thing.

Create Landing Pages for Each Assignment

When there are many assignments, every client needs a landing page in your own working system. This can be a OneNote page, a Word document, a folder, or just a plain text file. The tool matters less than the habit.

For each assignment, I want to have the basics in one place: scope, objectives, stakeholders, key links, recurring meetings, deliverables, open issues, and my own interpretation of what is really going on.

That last part is often the most valuable. Official project material tells you what should be happening. Your own notes tell you what is actually happening.

Before a meeting, I open the landing page and reload the context. After the meeting, I update it. It sounds boring because it is. It also works, which is a respectable quality in a working method.

Keep a Master Task List for Each Assignment

Notes are useful, but they are not enough. Each assignment also needs a task list.

I keep master task lists for my assignments, even when the client already has Jira, Planner, Excel, or some other system for managing work. Those tools are useful for the project. My own list is useful for me. It contains the things I personally need to remember, prepare, check, send, ask, or quietly worry about.

My method is simple. I often keep the task list as an Outlook calendar reservation with free status. If I do not finish the items, I move the reservation forward. It is not an elegant productivity system. It is more like placing a physical object in the corridor so you cannot walk past it forever.

The benefit is that tasks stay connected to time. A task list in a document is easy to forget. A calendar entry appears in front of you at the wrong moment, which is still better than never.

This also helps with context switching. When I return to an assignment, I can see not only the previous notes but also the concrete next actions. It reduces the empty staring phase at the beginning of work. Empty staring has its place, but usually not when the next meeting starts in eleven minutes.

Reduce Switching Where You Can

Some context switching is unavoidable. Some of it is self-inflicted.

The calendar is usually the first battlefield. If every day contains five clients, six topics, and one attempt to eat lunch while reading Teams messages, the week becomes mental porridge.

I try to group work by client or by type of task when possible. Client A in the morning, Client B in the afternoon, or Client C for the whole day. Writing or modeling work in longer blocks. Administrative work in one pile, where it can disappoint me efficiently.

That is not always possible. Consulting calendars have their own weather systems. Still, even a little grouping helps. One two-hour focused block often produces more than four scattered half-hours between meetings.

The goal is to manage switching—and to stop treating your brain like a shared server with unlimited users.

Make Starting Easy

The most dangerous moment in context switching is the first five minutes. You open the wrong folder, search for the right document, read three old emails, remember another task, answer a message, and suddenly the meeting starts. You are present physically, but mentally still somewhere else.

This is why every assignment should have an obvious next step.

When I stop working on something, I try to leave a small marker for myself: continue from here, update this diagram, send this question, review these comments. Often I do this with calendar reservations. The reservation gives me a place to continue and a reminder that the work still exists.

It is also worth preparing before meetings properly. Not dramatically. Just enough. Open the notes, check the previous decisions, look at the agenda, and remind yourself what role you are supposed to play in that discussion. Jumping directly from one meeting to another may be unavoidable at times, but it is rarely ideal. You need at least a small mental airlock between contexts.

Otherwise you may start the next meeting with the wrong client in your head.

Protect the Quality of Your Thinking

The risk in many parallel assignments is that you become reactive. You answer messages, attend meetings, produce slides, update diagrams, and keep all plates spinning. From the outside, it can look productive. From the inside, it can become a slow erosion of thinking.

Consultants are paid for expertise, judgment, structure, and communication. Those require actual thinking time. If your week contains only meetings and micro-tasks, the quality of your work will eventually suffer, even if your utilization rate looks excellent. Especially then.

I try to reserve time for synthesis. What is the real problem here? What should the client decide? What is missing from the picture? What is the simplest way to explain this?

This is often where the value is created. Not in attending the tenth meeting about the same topic, but in making sense of the mess between meetings.

Use AI as Support, Not as a Substitute

AI can help with context switching, but it does not remove the need to understand the context yourself.

I use AI where it makes sense: to structure rough notes, draft meeting summaries, turn messy thoughts into clearer text, or help prepare for a discussion. It can be useful when your head is still partly in the previous assignment and you need to quickly organize what you already know.

But AI is not a place where you outsource professional judgment. It does not know the client’s internal politics, the history behind a decision, or why one innocent-looking sentence in a steering group slide may cause a small organizational weather event. You still need to know what you are doing.

There is also the obvious but important issue of confidentiality. Client information, sensitive project material, personal data, commercial details, and internal discussions cannot just be copied into any tool that happens to have a text box. Use approved tools, follow client and employer policies, and anonymize or generalize content when needed.

In consulting, trust is part of the product. Losing it because of careless tool use would be an impressively modern way to create an old-fashioned problem.

For me, AI works best as a thinking assistant. It can help clean the table, but it should not decide what is served for dinner. The responsibility stays with the consultant.

Accept That Some Friction Is Part of the Job

Even with good notes, clean folders, task lists, and a well-managed calendar, context switching remains tiring. There is no magical productivity method that turns seven assignments into one peaceful long-term project.

Some days will feel fragmented. Some transitions will be clumsy. Sometimes you will need to read your own notes and wonder who wrote them. Then you realize it was you, yesterday, apparently with confidence.

That is fine. The goal is not to feel perfectly in control all the time. The goal is to create enough structure that the work remains professional, the clients get value, and you still have a functioning brain at the end of the week.

In consulting, context switching is part of the craft. You cannot avoid it completely, but you can become better at landing, taking off, and carrying the right mental luggage to the next meeting.

And when you get another long, single-client project someday, enjoy it. It is not just an assignment. It is almost like a spa treatment.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

That can happen even when you have a good job. Your colleagues may be decent, your clients mostly reasonable, your role clear enough, the work generally meaningful, and the salary good enough. Still, there are days when opening the laptop takes more effort than it should.

There are many possible reasons. Sometimes there is too little meaningful work, especially if client work is missing or the available tasks feel disconnected from what you are actually good at. Sometimes there is too much work, and your brain starts protecting itself by becoming strangely uninterested in all of it. Sometimes one large, unclear, or unpleasant task waits in front of you and makes everything else feel heavier. And sometimes something difficult has happened at work: a reorganization, a lost project, or a conflict.

Summer can make all this more visible. Many people are on vacation, projects move more slowly, decisions wait for someone who returns in August, and the normal rhythm of work becomes softer. There may still be tasks to do, but the sense of progress is weaker.

It is easy to make too much out of this feeling. Maybe I am in the wrong job. Maybe I have lost motivation. Maybe I need a big career change, a new role, or a cabin by a lake where I can think about my life purpose in a more photogenic way.

Sometimes bigger changes are needed. But a low-energy week is often just a low-energy week. Work is still work. Your brain may be tired, the task may be dull, and the current moment may have the emotional appeal of updating metadata.

Motivation Is Useful, But Unreliable

Motivation comes and goes. That is normal, although it can still feel surprising when it happens to you.

Motivation is useful, but it is also a bit of a luxury. Professional work cannot fully depend on feeling inspired. Sometimes you still need to prepare the meeting, write the document, answer the email, or move the project forward, even if your inner motivational speaker has taken a long lunch.

In expert work, that is easier said than done. The work often depends on thinking, writing, preparing, structuring, solving, and making sense of unclear situations. When your energy is low, the work becomes heavier because there is less routine to hide behind. You can follow your task list, but your brain may still move like it has accepted a summer schedule.

The useful question is: is it temporary, or is it becoming a pattern?

If work feels dull for a few days, or even a couple of weeks during a slow season, it may simply be a phase. If the same feeling continues for months, it deserves more attention. But before making large conclusions, it is often worth trying a few practical things first.

What to Do When Work Feels Flat

When work feels flat, waiting for perfect motivation is a risky strategy. Motivation is nice when it appears, but it is not always available when requested. A more practical approach is to lower the starting threshold and create a bit of movement.

Just Start Doing

My personal specialty in these situations is simple: just start doing.

Start before the conditions are perfect. Open the file. Write the first bad version. Fix one paragraph. Rename a heading. Create three rough bullet points. Move one small thing forward.

That is not a heroic productivity method. It is just a way to make the task less abstract. Often the hardest part is the first ten minutes. Once something exists on the screen, it becomes easier to continue. Thinking often follows doing, even though we like to imagine it always happens in the opposite order.

Create a Small Structure

When motivation is low, a large open task can feel heavier than it really is. In that situation, structure helps.

Pick one useful thing for the day. Not ten. One. It can be a draft, a decision proposal, one section of a document, one client email, or a cleaned-up task list. The point is to define what “enough progress” means today.

A small external rhythm can also help. Agree with a colleague that you will send a draft in the afternoon. Book a short review slot. Set a deadline before lunch. Create just enough structure that the task has edges.

This is not about turning yourself into a productivity machine. It is about reducing friction. Expert work often becomes difficult because the work is vague, not because the person is lazy.

Do Small Useful Things

When the big thinking does not come, do small useful things.

Update your CV. Clean up notes from the previous project. Write down lessons learned before they disappear completely. Improve one template. Organize your inbox. Check whether some internal material is still accurate. Send the follow-up message you have been avoiding. Prepare one useful slide for later.

These tasks may feel small, but they reduce future friction. They also give a small sense of completion, which helps when everything else feels slow.

Some days are not made for strategic breakthroughs. They are for making tomorrow slightly easier.

Use Music for Mechanical Work

For me, music helps only with mechanical routine work.

If I need to think deeply, music with too much energy or too many lyrics becomes one more thing competing for attention. But for routine architecture descriptions, emails, admin, formatting, updating lists, or cleaning up files, music can work well. The task moves, the brain complains less, and the work becomes easier to start.

The point is to make a dull task a little easier to finish, not to build a perfect productivity system.

Change the Input

Sometimes work feels flat because the input has become too narrow.

You read the same documents, talk to the same people, solve the same type of problem, and stay inside the same loop of thinking. After a while, even a good expert brain becomes a bit slow and repetitive.

Change something small. Talk to a colleague who sees the topic differently. Read something outside your immediate field. Go for a walk. Work from another place for a few hours. Ask someone what they would do next. Look at an old project and see whether it gives you a new idea.

Sometimes explaining the problem out loud already makes it smaller.

Avoid Useless Meetings

When work feels slow, it is tempting to create activity.

The easiest way to create activity is to book a meeting. Sometimes that is the right move. A meeting can be useful when there is a decision to make, shared understanding to build, or a difficult discussion to have.

But a meeting should have a real purpose. When work feels vague, another meeting may only move the vagueness into other people’s calendars. A short note, one clear question, or doing a small piece of work yourself may be the better option.

That is also a small act of kindness toward everyone’s calendar.

When to Look Deeper

There is a difference between a dull task and a draining situation.

A dull task may simply need structure, a smaller starting point, music in the background, or one useful deadline. It may still be boring, but boring work is part of most expert jobs. Even interesting careers contain admin, documentation, follow-up messages, and project material that has somehow survived from an earlier geological period.

A draining situation is different. If the work consistently leaves you exhausted, irritated, empty, or unable to recover, the issue may be bigger than motivation. Maybe the role has become too narrow. Maybe the project is a poor fit. Maybe you have stopped learning. Maybe the workload is unreasonable. Maybe you are tired in a way that a weekend will not fix.

These are different problems, and they need different responses.

A boring week may need a walk, a smaller task, and a practical start. A long period of detachment may need a serious conversation, a change in responsibilities, new challenges, more recovery, or eventually a bigger career decision.

The point is to treat normal low motivation as normal, while also taking repeated signals seriously.

Keep Moving, Lightly

When work feels flat, fake enthusiasm rarely helps. Most people are not very convincing when they try to perform motivation.

A better approach is to stay lightly in motion.

Start doing. Pick a small useful task. Use music if it helps with routine work. Change the input. Avoid meetings that only create the appearance of progress. Talk to someone. Finish something small. Keep the standard, but reduce the drama.

A flat period does not automatically mean you are in the wrong place. Even good jobs include dull tasks, slow weeks, and moments when your professional ambition seems to be on summer vacation.

That is fine. Do something useful anyway. Then do the next thing. Sometimes that is enough to get the wheels moving again.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

I have personally been quite lucky with this. Many of the assignments I have worked in were sold by others, and I was staffed into them when there was a suitable need for my expertise. That is a nice position to be in. It also makes it easy to forget that staffing is not always such a smooth experience for everyone, or even for the same person at a different time.

Sometimes your manager is active and genuinely looks for the next good challenge for you. Sometimes directors, account leads, and project managers know your profile and contact you before you even have time to update your CV. This is nice. It almost makes consulting look like a well-functioning system.

At other times, nothing happens.

You finish an assignment, update some internal system that may or may not be read by another human being, and wait. Meanwhile, opportunities move around somewhere above, beside, or behind you. You may be perfectly capable, motivated, and available, but still too invisible when staffing decisions are made.

That is why being easy to staff matters. It is not the same as being desperate for any work. It is about making it easy for the right people to understand what you can do, where you fit, and why placing you in a project would be a safe idea.

Staffing Is Not Only About Competence

Consultants like to believe that good work speaks for itself. Sometimes it does. But often it speaks quite softly.

Competence matters, of course. You need to know what you are doing. But staffing decisions are also based on trust, timing, visibility, client fit, availability, previous experiences, and sometimes very practical things like who answered a message before lunch.

There can also be a bit of internal politics involved. The opportunity may belong to a certain unit, account, country, practice, or director’s area. People may prefer to staff “their own” consultants, even when someone from another unit would be a slightly better match. It is not always malicious. Often it is just how organizations protect revenue, relationships, and control.

Project managers, account leads, and directors usually want to reduce risk. They want people who can deliver, communicate clearly, behave professionally with the client, and not create a separate management problem around themselves. It does not mean you need to be the most charismatic person in the company. It often means that you are reliable, understandable, and not surrounded by unnecessary fog.

Being easy to staff is therefore partly about competence, partly about communication, and partly about understanding how the organization actually works. The communication part is easy to underestimate, especially if you are good at the competence part.

Keep Your Profile Usable

One of the most practical things you can do is keep your internal profile, CV, skill records, and project history in good shape.

It sounds boring because it is boring. It is also useful, which is an unfair combination.

When someone is looking for a consultant for a proposal or project, they rarely have time to investigate your professional soul in detail. They need to understand quickly what you have done, what you are good at, which roles you can take, and where you could fit.

This becomes especially important in public sector proposals, at least in my experience. We often get requests where detailed information is needed from all relevant projects: exact roles, dates, person-hours, client types, technologies, methods, and deliverables. Someone then has to determine whether your experience fulfills the formal criteria. That is much easier if your project history is accurate before the deadline starts breathing heavily in the background.

So, you probably need two versions of your professional history.

Internally, you need an accurate and detailed record of what you have worked on. This is the raw material. But the CV you submit to a client is different. It should not be a full archive of everything you have ever touched. It should be tailored to the case and show your value for that specific client need. What problem can you help solve? Why are your previous roles relevant? Why are you a safe and credible choice?

And when someone asks you for missing CV details, answer quickly. It may feel like a small administrative nuisance, because it is. But it can also decide whether you are included in a proposal, whether the company can offer the best team, and whether someone else spends their evening trying to guess what you actually did in 2019.

If your background is hard to understand, people may choose someone else simply because that person was easier to present to the client.

Talk to the People Who Influence Staffing

It also does not hurt to talk widely with the people who influence staffing.

This includes your manager, account leads, project managers, directors, salespeople, capability leads, and sometimes that one person who seems to know everything before it is officially announced. Every consulting company has at least one.

These conversations do not need to be political theater. You do not need to perform a personal brand monologue in every coffee chat. A simple, clear message is enough: this is what I have been doing, this is what I would like to do next, this is where I can help, and this is when I may become available.

The point is to become visible in a useful way.

If people only hear from you when you are already unstaffed, you are late. If they know your direction earlier, they can connect you to opportunities before everything has been decided. Staffing often happens through half-formed thoughts and early discussions long before anyone creates an official request. Being present in those conversations helps.

Make Yourself a Safe Choice

A consultant who is easy to staff is usually a safe choice.

Safe does not mean boring. It means that people trust you to handle the basics without drama. You communicate early if something is unclear. You ask sensible questions. You do not disappear. You can work with different personalities. You understand that the client is not interested in your internal complications, even when those complications are fascinating in their own small bureaucratic way.

This kind of trust accumulates slowly. One good project makes the next project easier. One satisfied project manager remembers you. One account lead sees that the client liked working with you. A colleague mentions your name because you helped them before. None of this is magic. It is reputation doing its quiet work.

The practical advice is simple: do good work, but also make sure the right people know what kind of good work you do.

Do Something Useful Between Assignments

If billable work is not available immediately, the worst option is to become professionally passive.

Of course, a short pause after a demanding project can be healthy. Sometimes the best internal contribution is not collapsing in the next client workshop. But after that, it is useful to do something that creates value.

Support sales. Go through your previous clients and assignments: where could there be new needs, follow-up work, or people worth reconnecting with? Improve offering content. Help a colleague. Build a reusable template. Write a short internal note about what you learned in the previous project. Study something that clearly supports market demand. Improve your visibility on LinkedIn by writing about topics you actually understand. Make your expertise easier to find, explain, and sell. Or fix an internal problem that everyone has learned to walk around like office furniture.

It matters for two reasons. First, it creates real value. Second, it shows that you are not just waiting to be placed somewhere. You are helping create the next opportunity, either for yourself or for someone else. Consulting firms remember people who help keep the machine moving.

And if billing has been low for a while, this may also matter in a more direct way. When difficult staffing or cost decisions are made, you probably do not want to be remembered as the person who mainly waited for someone else to solve the problem. You want to be the person who stayed useful, visible, and commercially aware even between assignments. That may not protect anyone forever, but it is a much better position to be in.

Do Not Become Available for Everything

There is a risk on the other side as well.

If you try too hard to be easy to staff, you may start accepting everything. Any role, any client, any project, any topic, any calendar shape. At first, this may look like flexibility. In small doses, flexibility is good. In large doses, it becomes career drift.

You can end up in work that does not fit your skills, does not develop your profile, or puts you in situations where you are unlikely to succeed. You may also become known as the person who can always be thrown at a problem. That sounds useful until you realize the problems are usually thrown because nobody else wanted to catch them.

Being staffable means being a good fit for the right work, with enough flexibility to help when needed and enough judgment to protect your direction.

Sometimes you should say yes to a stretch assignment. That is how you grow. Sometimes you may also need to take one for the team, because consulting is still a team sport, despite all the personal utilization metrics. But there is a difference between helping occasionally and becoming the default solution for badly scoped work. If the role is clearly outside your competence or harmful to your direction, it is reasonable to discuss it. That is just professional.

The Real Goal

The goal is not to become the easiest person to staff into anything.

The goal is to become an easy and trusted choice for the kind of work where your skills, interests, and the client’s needs meet. That requires competence, but also communication. Keep your CV and internal profile usable. Talk to the people who shape opportunities. Make your availability known early. Help create demand. Stay useful when you are between assignments.

And keep some boundaries.

A strong consulting career is not built by hiding quietly and hoping the perfect project finds you. It is also not built by saying yes to everything until your calendar looks like a badly governed portfolio. The better path is more practical: make your value visible, stay easy to work with, and choose carefully enough that your next assignment also helps build the one after that.

🗓️ An Article on One of My Favorite Topics

I recently wrote a short Finnish guest blog post about one of my favorite themes: how to combine demanding expert work, writing, and the rest of life without trying to squeeze everything into the same week.

For me, the answer has been the four-day workweek—not as a productivity hack, but as a way to redesign the structure of work.

If you read Finnish, you can find the post here:

Kun kaikki tärkeä ei mahdu samaan viikkoon

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | The Senior Expert Pay Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

Consulting firms may talk about many things, but billing is where the business model becomes very concrete. It is so important that in some companies, it also finds its way directly into personal compensation.

I have worked in companies with a billing-based bonus model and in companies without one. I have also seen different versions of it. In some firms, the model is fairly light: utilization matters, but it is only one part of the overall picture. In others, the connection between billable hours and total compensation is much more aggressive.

Billing is not the only thing that matters, of course. We also talk about client value, competence development, teamwork, thought leadership, culture, and other important things that look good on slides. But at the end of the month, someone still checks how many hours were billed.

That is not unreasonable. Consulting companies sell expertise, and most of that expertise is sold as time. If consultants do not bill, the business model starts to develop a slight breathing problem. Utilization is not a dirty word. It is one of the basic mechanics of the business.

Still, when bonuses are strongly tied to billing rate or billable hours, things get more interesting. And by interesting, I mean slightly uncomfortable.

Why Billing-Based Bonuses Make Sense

Let’s start with the obvious: billing-based bonuses are not stupid.

They are simple, measurable, and connected to the economics of consulting. A consultant who is billable brings revenue. A consultant who is not billable costs money, unless they are doing something else that creates future value. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are just making another version of the internal capability deck, now with updated icons.

From the company’s point of view, a billing-based bonus sends a clear message: client work matters. It encourages people to stay staffed, keep assignments running, and take ownership of their commercial value. Especially in larger consulting firms, this kind of metric also creates comparability. Everyone can argue about whether someone is “strategic” or “senior enough,” but a utilization percentage is brutally clear.

There is also a fairness argument. If two consultants have similar roles, but one is fully billable most of the year and the other is often on the bench, it is understandable that compensation reflects that difference. The company is not a public library of expert potential. It needs revenue.

So far, so good.

The Consultant Does Not Always Control the Number

The problem begins when billing rate is treated as if it were fully under the consultant’s control.

Sometimes it is, partly. Experienced consultants often influence their own utilization. They build client relationships, create follow-on work, help sales, maintain a strong profile, and make themselves the kind of person project managers want to staff again. They deliver reliably, avoid becoming difficult to work with, and generally behave like someone you can safely put in front of a client without bringing a fire extinguisher. That matters.

But utilization is also heavily shaped by things outside the individual consultant’s control. Someone else may sell the work. Someone else may staff the project. The market may slow down. A client may postpone a project. A framework agreement may end. A larger program may be cancelled because the client’s budget suddenly disappeared.

That is especially true for junior consultants or specialists with a narrow competence area. They may be willing, capable, and motivated, but still depend on account leads, sales teams, managers, and internal staffing processes. Telling them to “improve their utilization” can be like telling someone working at the airport to improve the weather.

Of course, consultants are not helpless. But they are also not fully autonomous revenue machines. That is why a bonus model should be careful with the message it sends. It is fair to expect consultants to take ownership of their employability and commercial value. It is less fair to pretend that every utilization percentage is a direct measurement of individual effort or quality.

What Billing Bonuses Can Accidentally Encourage

A metric does not only measure behavior. It shapes it.

If billing rate becomes too important, consultants start optimizing for billing rate. That is not because consultants are morally weak. It is because they are human, and humans tend to notice where money comes from. Even very thoughtful professionals become surprisingly practical when their bonus depends on a percentage.

The first risk is short-termism. Internal development, training, mentoring, marketing, service development, recruitment support, and sales support all matter. They help the firm become better and sell more in the future. But they do not always help this month’s utilization. If the bonus model strongly rewards only billable work, these activities become something people do after the “real work,” meaning late in the evening, badly, or not at all.

The second risk is hoarding. A consultant may try to stay in a project even when someone else would be a better fit, simply because leaving would reduce utilization. A manager may be tempted to keep good people busy in decent work instead of freeing them for better opportunities. From a spreadsheet perspective, that can look efficient. From a career and client value perspective, it can be a small tragedy with nice formatting.

The third risk is ethical. A billing-based bonus does not automatically make people unethical. Most consultants want to do good work and keep their reputation intact. But if the pressure to bill becomes too strong, people may start stretching tasks, resisting efficiency, protecting unnecessary meetings, or treating every client question as a new billable opportunity. In worse cases, it can encourage vague time entries, overbilling, or selling work that is more useful for utilization than for the client.

That is where the line matters. A consultant should create value, not just hours. Sometimes the right professional answer is: this does not need a workshop, it can be solved in one call, or you do not need us for this. These are rarely the most billable sentences in the world. But they are often the sentences that build trust.

Good consulting firms understand this. Bad ones eventually train clients to defend themselves against their consultants, which is not a great long-term strategy.

A Better Bonus Model

The better question is not whether billing should matter. It should. The question is whether it should matter alone.

A healthier bonus model treats utilization as one signal among others. It can be combined with client feedback, delivery quality, sales contribution, competence development, and contribution to the firm’s long-term capability. It should stay simple enough that people understand it without needing a separate onboarding program, but broad enough to avoid worshipping utilization as the only visible god.

It should also recognize career level. A junior consultant can do many right things and still have low utilization because no suitable project exists. For senior consultants, expectations can be higher. They should help create work, expand client relationships, build offerings, and support others. At senior levels, being billable is good. Making others billable is even better.

Every bonus model tells people what the company truly values. Not what it says it values on the website, but what it values when money is involved. If a firm rewards only billing, people will learn that billing is what matters. Billing-based bonuses are not evil. They are just incomplete.

Utilization tells something important about a consultant’s contribution, but it does not tell the whole story. A good bonus model should reward the business consulting firms actually want to build, not only the hours they managed to invoice this month.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | The Senior Expert Pay Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

Sure, they can be demanding, impatient, unclear, and sometimes visibly frustrated. But usually there is a fairly understandable reason behind it. They have a problem to solve, a project to deliver, a budget to explain, and someone above them asking why everything is still “in progress.” As a consultant, you are often simply close enough to receive some of that pressure.

With colleagues and consultants from other companies, I have needed thick skin a little more often.

Not because people are generally terrible. Most people are quite decent, at least on a good day and before the afternoon’s last meeting. But expert work creates situations where ego, insecurity, competition, unclear roles, and time pressure all sit around the same table.

This is where thick skin becomes useful. Not as a way to stop caring, but as a way to keep your judgment when the situation gets unnecessarily personal, political, or just a bit stupid. The trick is to build enough distance to stay calm without turning into the kind of person who expects the worst from everyone and calls it realism.

Why Thick Skin Is Needed

Thick skin does not mean that nothing feels bad. That would probably require a medical condition, or a very successful career in law.

It means that you can continue functioning when something feels uncomfortable for a moment. Someone questions your work. Someone ignores your idea and presents almost the same idea two weeks later as their own. Someone uses a meeting mainly to prove that they are the smartest person in the virtual room. Someone is cold or dismissive, and you have no idea why.

The first reaction is often personal.

Did I do something wrong? Why is this person behaving like this toward me? Should I defend myself? Should I write a very long message that I will later regret but briefly enjoy while writing?

Sometimes you should respond firmly. But often the more useful interpretation is simpler: it is probably not about you.

People carry their own pressures, fears, ambitions, and internal politics. Difficult behavior is often a symptom of something else. This does not make it acceptable, but it makes it easier to handle. You do not have to take every sharp comment home with you like a small, unpleasant souvenir.'

The Problem Is Often the Story We Add

In difficult situations, the problem is rarely the feeling itself. Irritation, disappointment, and insecurity are normal reactions. They mostly prove that you are still human and have not yet become a completely emotionless work robot.

The bigger issue is the story we build on top of the feeling.

If every critical comment becomes a personal attack, work gets heavy very quickly. Or if every case of poor behavior is explained away with “this is just how things are,” you slowly become cynical. Then you stop expecting anything sensible from people. It is one way to protect yourself, but not a very useful way to work with others.

The better option is somewhere in the middle. You can notice that a situation felt unpleasant and still analyze it calmly. Was there something useful in the criticism? Was the style bad, but the content valid? Was there a real issue, or was someone just trying to look important in front of an audience?

It is not always easy. But it is useful.

A surprising amount of professional maturity is just the ability to separate the message from the noise around it. Even when the noise has a job title.

Practical Ways to Build Thick Skin

The first habit is to create a delay. You do not have to answer everything immediately, even if Teams, Slack, email, and your inner defense lawyer all suggest otherwise. When a message irritates you, write the response, leave it for a moment, and then remove the most emotional half. Usually that deleted half is exactly the part that would have turned a small issue into a workshop series.

The second habit is to separate feedback, status, and personal value from each other. If someone dislikes your proposal, it does not mean you are bad at your work. If someone behaves rudely, it does not mean you are weak if you do not answer in the same style. Professionalism is not submission. Often it is simply choosing which battles deserve your energy.

The third habit is to keep a basically positive view of people, but without becoming naive. Most people try to do their work reasonably well. Some do it clumsily. Some behave badly under pressure. And a small minority are genuinely difficult cases. With them, it is better to agree clear boundaries, document important points, keep the discussion concrete, and escalate through the right channels if needed. That is not drama. It is just handling the problem at the right level before it quietly poisons your work.

It also helps to get perspective outside the project bubble. When one comment, meeting, or email starts to feel too big, talk about it with a trusted colleague. Not to build a small support group around your own excellence, but to check the proportions. Many dramatic work situations become smaller when you explain them out loud to a normal person. Preferably someone who is not also in the same steering group.

AI can also be surprisingly useful here. Not as a therapist, career coach, or replacement for judgment. But it is good at analyzing the situation more neutrally when you are too close to it, and at turning an irritated draft into something calm and usable. It can help separate the actual message from the emotional packaging, remove the sharp edges, and produce a version that sounds like a professional wrote it before opening the email became a small personal crisis.

Thick Skin With a Soft Core

The best kind of thick skin does not make a person hard. It makes a person more flexible. Or resilient, if we want to use the official word.

You can receive criticism, deal with difficult people, and work under pressure without letting every unpleasant moment make you a little more bitter. That is the part worth protecting. Not your ego, but your ability to stay constructive.

Cynicism sometimes looks like experience. Often it is just tiredness wearing business casual.

An experienced person knows that people can be difficult, projects can be messy, and organizations can behave in ways that make very little sense. Still, they can stay practical. They can ask what needs to happen next. They can decide whether the issue is worth addressing, ignoring, escalating, or simply surviving until Friday.

Developing thick skin means that you do not let other people’s temporary bad behavior define your own way of working. It is a practical skill, not a personality transplant.

And like most practical skills, it develops slowly, usually through exactly those situations where it would have been nice to already have it.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | The Senior Expert Pay Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

There is no clear end of shift in many roles. The laptop can be closed, but the work may still continue in messages, thoughts, calendar invites, half-decisions, and small things that “would be good to handle today”.

This is not always caused by a bad workplace or unreasonable people. Often it is just how modern work is built. Communication is fast, calendars are shared, tools are always available, and many tasks do not have a clean natural ending. There is always something that could be clarified, improved, answered, checked, prepared, or moved forward.

So work creeps.

It creeps into the evening through one quick reply. It creeps into lunch through a meeting that had no other slot. It creeps into a weekend through unfinished tasks that did not fit anywhere else. It creeps into your head when you are technically not working, but still mentally running the next decision.

Nobody usually decides to give away their free time. It happens in smaller pieces.

One exception. One fast answer. One “I’ll just check this quickly”. One task that should not take long.

After a while, the working model has changed without anyone saying it out loud.

The problem is not that every small exception is wrong. Sometimes they are needed. The problem is when these small exceptions become the default way of working.

At that point, it is worth asking a practical question: are you protecting your free time with actual structures, or are you just hoping work will stop at the right moment by itself?

It usually will not. Work is not that polite.

Why Free Time Needs Structure

Free time is easy to treat as a personal matter.

You can decide that evenings are free. You can decide not to work on Fridays. You can decide that at least weekends are protected. These are good decisions, and sometimes they help.

But personal decisions are often too weak if the surrounding work system says something else.

If your calendar is open, people will book it. If you answer messages quickly in the evening, people may learn that evening is a possible response time. If every new request is added without removing anything, the extra work has to go somewhere. Usually it goes into the edges of the day.

This is why free time does not protect itself. It needs a working model that other people can see.

There is also a strange habit in working life where free time becomes more acceptable if you can attach a socially approved reason to it. Family situation. Children. Health. Care responsibilities. Some serious hobby with equipment expensive enough to look like a second job.

All of these can be real and important reasons. But they should not be required.

Free time should not need a defence case. You do not need to prove that your evening is valuable enough to be protected. The default should be that time outside work is not available, unless something else has been clearly agreed.

The point is not to make collaboration difficult. The point is to make expectations clear before they become a problem.

Practical Ways To Protect Free Time

The practical answer is not to become more strict about everything. That usually does not work, makes normal collaboration annoying, and is not great for your career.

The better answer is to make the default way of working clearer. When the default is visible, people know what to expect, and exceptions are easier to handle without turning them into the new normal.

Make The Working Model Concrete

The first step is to move from intentions to visible rules.

“Trying to be better with time” is not a working model. “No meetings after 15:00 on Fridays” is.

“Need to focus more” is not a working model. “Mornings are blocked for deep work” is.

“Let’s reduce unnecessary meetings” is not a working model. “Every meeting needs a clear purpose, decision, or reason for me to be there” is.

These rules do not need to be dramatic. They are not personal manifestos. They are just information about how work gets done.

For example, you can define that non-urgent messages are answered during working hours. You can keep one afternoon meeting-free. You can block focused work time before the week fills up. You can agree with your team that urgent topics go through a specific channel, while everything else can wait.

The more concrete the rule is, the easier it is for others to respect it. Vague boundaries create vague behavior. Clear boundaries create less guessing.

Slightly boring, yes. But boring is often where the useful stuff lives.

Choose What You Participate In

A lot of time disappears through participation that was never really questioned.

A meeting appears in the calendar, so you join. A message thread includes your name, so you follow it. A discussion is happening, so you feel you should have an opinion. A working group is created, and suddenly your calendar has a new recurring meeting that may live longer than some software products.

Not all participation is useful participation.

Before joining something, it helps to ask a few basic questions. Am I needed here, or just included? Is there a decision to make? Do I have information that others do not have? Will this discussion change what I do next? Could I contribute better by writing a short comment instead of attending the whole meeting?

This is not about being passive or avoiding responsibility. It is about using attention where it actually creates value.

A useful habit is to clarify your role before accepting the time cost:

“Do you need me for the whole meeting, or just one topic?”
“Is there a specific decision where you need my input?”
“I can comment async, but I probably do not need to join the full session.”
“Please include me in the summary, unless there is something I need to decide.”

This protects time in a very practical way. You are not saying that the topic is unimportant. You are saying that your participation should have a purpose. Because being included is not the same as being needed.

Prioritize With Trade-Offs

A lot of free time disappears because new work is added without changing the old plan.

A request arrives, and instead of deciding whether it is more important than the current work, it is simply added to the pile. Everyone stays polite, the plan becomes unrealistic, and the calendar quietly absorbs the problem.

This is where prioritization needs to become practical.

A useful rule is simple: if something new becomes important, something else should become less important.

That can sound like:

“Yes, we can do this, but then something else moves.”
“Yes, but not this week.”
“Yes, if we reduce the scope.”
“No, unless this is more important than the current priority.”

This is not negative. It is just honest.

Time and attention are real constraints. If those constraints are not discussed, they still exist. They just show up later as overtime, rushed work, or tired decision-making.

Otherwise the priority list is not a priority list. It is just a polite collection of wishes.

Make Exceptions Explicit

Prioritization is about what fits into the plan. Exceptions are about what happens outside the normal plan.

Every working model needs some flexibility. Sometimes something genuinely important happens at a bad time. A deadline is close. A colleague needs help. A customer issue appears. Normal work has these moments, and pretending otherwise would be very cute but not very useful.

The problem is not the occasional exception. The problem is when the exception quietly becomes the new agreement.

One evening reply becomes normal evening availability. One Friday task becomes regular Friday work. One “just this once” becomes a pattern with no name.

For most people, the answer is not to negotiate every exception like a contract lawyer with a calendar. Often it is enough to make the situation visible:

“I can help with this today because it is important, but let’s treat it as an exception.”
“I can do this on Friday this time, but Fridays are not normally available.”
“I can answer this now so we can keep things moving, but I do not want evening replies to become the expected pattern.”
“If this keeps happening, we should change the working model.”

The goal is not to be difficult. The goal is to prevent silent drift.

Silent drift is when the working model changes without any real discussion. Nobody decides that evenings are now working time. Nobody announces that Fridays are now overflow days. It just becomes normal because it happened a few times and nobody named it.

That is how free time disappears in a very polite and professional way.

What a 4-Day Week Actually Changes

A 4-day workweek is useful mainly because it makes the shape of work visible.

It does not need to be a lifestyle statement. It does not need to come with a podcast, a personal brand, or a dramatic post about walking in nature on Fridays.

At its simplest, it means that the main work happens from Monday to Thursday, and Friday is not treated as normal delivery time.

That already changes the conversation. If something new appears on Wednesday, the question is no longer “can you just fit this in by Friday?” The better question is “what should move?”

Friday can have a purpose, but it should not become a disguised fifth workday. It can be genuinely free, or it can be intentionally reserved for something specific like learning or a side project.

The mistake is to call it a 4-day week while using Friday as hidden overflow. If Friday is always available when things get messy, then the model is not really a 4-day week. It is a normal 5-day week with worse calendar hygiene and more self-deception. Which is also a model, just not a very good one.

Of course, a 4-day week is not possible or useful for everyone. The broader point is not the number of days. The point is that working time should have a shape. It should not be an open container where everything eventually lands.

Recovery Is Part of the Work

Free time is often discussed as a wellbeing topic. That is valid, but it is not the whole picture.

In expert work, recovery also affects the quality of the work.

Tired people make worse decisions. They avoid difficult conversations. They accept unclear priorities. They create more complicated solutions because they do not have the energy to simplify. They say yes when they should slow the discussion down.

A lot of expert work depends on judgment. What matters? What should wait? Where is the risk? What should be simplified? What needs to be challenged? What is actually worth doing?

That kind of work needs attention. And attention does not survive very well if every week is filled to the edges.

So protecting free time is not separate from doing good work. It is one of the things that makes good work possible.

This is also why the topic should not be reduced to personal comfort. It is not only about wanting easier days, although wanting easier days is not a crime against humanity either. It is about sustainability, clarity, and better work.

A Working Model Beats Willpower

Most people do not lose their free time because of one bad decision. They lose it because the normal way of working slowly expands.

Messages, meetings, small tasks, urgent requests, and harmless-looking exceptions start to fill the space that was never clearly protected.

That is why the solution needs to be practical, not heroic. Free time is protected by defaults: when you are available, how meetings are handled, how priorities change, what counts as urgent, and what happens when something falls outside the normal pattern.

The exact model can vary. A 4-day week can work. So can protected mornings, a meeting-free afternoon, fixed response times, or a clear rule that new work requires trade-offs.

The important part is that there is a model.

Because if you do not define how your time is used, the work will define it for you. Usually through the next calendar invite.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | The Senior Expert Pay Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

In my first consulting job, I acted as a team lead in two of my last projects. The role itself was somewhat artificial, mostly used by my manager and me as a way to justify a promotion to a manager title. Without that framing, the promotion—and the corresponding salary increase—would have been difficult to push through. I did not stay in that company long enough for this to become a major career phase, but the logic was clear enough.

Later, I have seen a similar pattern from the other side. In some recruiting discussions, team lead responsibility has been positioned almost as a prerequisite for meeting a certain salary expectation. The message is not always explicit, but the implication is usually clear: higher compensation is easier to justify if it comes with a role that looks like management.

This question tends to appear in fairly predictable situations. Annual discussions, promotion cycles, or job changes often create a moment where the next logical step is presented as some version of team leadership.

These experiences frame the question in a particular way. If higher salary is tied to a team lead role, does it make sense to take the role mainly for that reason?

From a distance, the answer might look obvious. In practice, it is usually not.

The Role Change Is Larger Than It Looks

The team lead role often appears to be a natural continuation of senior expert work.

You already understand the domain. You already contribute to decisions. You are already involved in complex situations and helping other people solve problems. The next step can look incremental from the outside.

Usually it is not. The center of gravity changes. Instead of solving problems directly, you start managing how problems are solved. Instead of focusing mainly on content, you spend more time on coordination, communication, prioritization, staffing concerns, and alignment between people with different expectations.

A larger part of the work moves into conversations that are not really about the solution itself.

Some people enjoy this shift immediately. Others gradually notice that the part of the work they originally found most interesting becomes smaller over time.

Neither reaction is wrong. But the distinction matters more than people sometimes expect.

Why The Decision Is More Complex Than It Looks

Higher salary is often the most visible part of the role change. It is also the simplest part to understand.

The increase reflects broader organizational responsibility, not necessarily a direct continuation of the work you have been doing so far. The organization is paying for a somewhat different type of contribution: coordination, accountability, people management, and operational stability at the team level.

That distinction becomes important surprisingly quickly.

If the motivation is mainly financial, the decision can feel reasonable in the short term. Over time, however, the daily structure of the work tends to dominate the experience. If the role itself does not fit particularly well, the salary increase rarely compensates for the mismatch indefinitely.

The decision also influences longer-term direction. Team lead roles often move people gradually toward management tracks where success is measured less through direct expert contribution and more through organizational coordination and responsibility. Returning fully to expert-focused work later is possible, but usually less straightforward than people assume.

At the same time, many experts quietly assume that compensation growth more or less requires moving into management. That is not always true either.

In many environments, senior expert roles can eventually reach comparable compensation levels. The mechanism is simply different. Instead of formal managerial responsibility, compensation tends to follow positioning, visibility, trusted judgment, client impact, and involvement in situations that matter commercially or strategically.

That path is usually less explicit and less structured than the management path, which is partly why people underestimate it.

Looking only at the immediate salary difference hides most of these trade-offs.

When the Role Actually Fits

There are also many situations where taking a team lead role makes complete sense.

Some people are already operating that way informally before the title changes. They coordinate work, support less experienced colleagues, help resolve conflicts, and naturally become central points of responsibility inside projects or teams. In those cases, formalizing the role often changes less than expected.

The role also fits people who genuinely enjoy helping teams function better. Some experts eventually realize that they are more interested in enabling other people’s work than maximizing their own technical depth. Others discover that broader organizational influence feels more meaningful than individual problem-solving.

It can also be a good long-term step for people who want to move further into leadership positions later in their careers.

In these situations, the role aligns relatively naturally with both the person’s strengths and the direction they already want to move toward.

The Alternative Expert Path

One reason team lead roles create pressure is that many organizations make management progression highly visible while expert progression remains less clearly defined.

The management ladder is easier to explain. Titles change predictably, responsibility expands visibly, and compensation bands are often clearer. Expert careers tend to evolve more indirectly.

Still, alternative paths do exist. Senior experts often create substantial organizational value without formal people management responsibility. For example in consulting, this may involve shaping major client decisions, structuring ambiguous situations, supporting strategic initiatives, improving delivery quality across teams, or becoming trusted in commercially important contexts.

The work may look less impressive organizationally because it does not involve direct managerial authority. Economically, however, the impact can still become very significant over time.

The challenge is that this path usually requires stronger positioning and clearer visibility than management roles do. The contribution needs to become understandable in contexts where compensation decisions are made. That tends to happen more gradually.

A Better Question to Ask

Instead of asking whether the salary increase justifies the move, a more useful question is often simpler:

Do you actually want the work that comes with the role?

That includes the parts that are less visible in the job description: coordination, performance discussions, difficult people situations, competing priorities, organizational friction, and less uninterrupted expert work.

In expert careers, many decisions look like compensation decisions on the surface. In practice, they are often decisions about the type of work you want to spend the next few years doing.

Salary follows that choice more often than it defines it.

Choosing a role mainly for the compensation can work reasonably well for a while. Over time, however, the actual nature of the work tends to dominate the experience. And that is usually what determines whether the decision was ultimately a good one.

📘 Explore the Topic Further

If this perspective resonates, I explore the same theme in more detail in my Senior Expert Playbook series.

The Senior Expert Career Playbook looks at how expert careers actually develop in practice—covering positioning, visibility, and how contribution becomes understood inside organizations.

The Senior Expert Pay Playbook builds on that and explains how compensation typically forms through perceived impact, trust, and structural alignment, not just performance reviews or negotiation.

Together, the books focus on a simple idea: your work matters, but how it is interpreted often matters just as much.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

Once a year, you sit down with your manager. Goals are discussed and written down. They often sound reasonable, but also slightly abstract. Things like client value, leadership, development. At that point, it is not always entirely clear what is expected of you in practice.

Then you work, more or less like before. Projects move forward, problems get solved, clients are kept reasonably satisfied, and some things quietly improve without much visibility. If the goals happen to include something concrete, you may try to align with it. But in most cases, the work is still driven by the situation rather than the wording of the targets.

Toward the end of the cycle, you are asked to summarize what you did. You write a structured description of how your work aligns with the goals. If you have done this a few times, you know how to make it sound coherent.

After that, the process moves somewhere else. A group of managers compares people, discusses outcomes, and decides who gets promoted, who receives a salary increase, and who continues more or less as before. The criteria are visible, but the actual decision-making is usually a black box for anyone not in the room.

At this point, it is reasonable to ask what the process is actually optimizing for.

My own experience with this has been somewhat mixed. A significant part of my career has happened without formal performance targets beyond basic things like client work and utilization. At other times, I have had clearly defined but fairly abstract goals similar to most large consulting organizations. Looking at both sides, the difference in how the work itself felt was not particularly large. The difference was mainly in how that work was later described and interpreted.

This raises a few practical questions. Do performance reviews actually measure the right things, or mainly what is easiest to describe? Do they meaningfully influence how people work, or do most experienced professionals continue to focus on what the situation requires?

And how much do they really matter for promotions and salary decisions? In many cases, the outcome seems to reflect a broader view that has already formed over time.

More broadly, who is the process actually for? Does it genuinely help anyone, or is it mainly a structured way to make the outcome look consistent?

Why Performance Reviews Need Structure

Organizations are not running performance reviews because they enjoy them.

They need a way to make decisions about people that can be explained and defended. Promotions, salary increases, and role changes create expectations and comparisons. Without some structure, decisions would feel arbitrary, even when they are reasonable.

So frameworks are introduced. Competencies are defined. Evaluation criteria are linked to strategy. The intention is straightforward: create a common language that connects individual contribution to organizational goals.

In smaller organizations, this often remains relatively informal. Decisions are based on direct knowledge of people’s work. In larger organizations, distance increases. Not everyone sees everyone else’s contribution in detail, and decisions need to be aligned across teams.

There is a clear logic behind this. When work becomes complex and distributed, structure is introduced to make it more manageable. The result is a system that is less about precise measurement and more about creating a shared interpretation that holds together across the organization.

The question is how well that structure actually captures what is happening in practice.

Why It Can Feel Like Theater

The intention behind performance reviews is reasonable, but the experience can feel different.

On paper, the process looks structured and consistent. In practice, it often feels slightly detached from how work actually happens. Not completely wrong, but not quite aligned either.

The gap comes from a few recurring challenges.

The first is the level of abstraction. The metrics exist, but they are often too high-level to capture how value is created in practice. Different types of contribution can end up competing inside the same category, even though they are not directly comparable.

The second is behavioral. In theory, performance frameworks should guide how people work. In practice, most experienced consultants focus on what the situation requires. Client needs, project constraints, and real-world problems tend to override abstract targets. The evaluation system follows the work, not the other way around.

The third is the link to decisions. Performance reviews are formally tied to promotions and salary changes, but the actual decisions often reflect a broader view: accumulated contribution, reputation, role evolution, and perceived potential. The review summarizes that view, but rarely creates it.

In situations where many people are performing well, the distinction becomes even less precise. When several candidates could reasonably be considered strong performers, the outcome is shaped through discussion rather than measurement. The ability to explain and advocate for a person’s contribution starts to matter. Visibility, credibility, and influence inside the organization can tilt the outcome, even when the formal criteria are the same.

This is where the process can start to feel like theater.

The structure is formal, the criteria are defined, and the outcome is presented as if it follows directly from the inputs. But in reality, much of the decision has already taken shape before the formal evaluation. The review becomes a way to describe and justify that outcome in a consistent format.

Nothing in the process is fake. The work is real, and the decisions are real. But the connection between the two is not always as direct as it appears.

How to Work With the System

Trying to optimize the performance review itself usually has limited effect. By the time the discussion happens, most of the interpretation has already formed.

What tends to matter more is how easy your contribution is to interpret during the year.

This does not require gaming the system. In practice, it often means making the work visible in concrete terms. Not just what was done, but what changed because of it. Connecting your work to outcomes that others recognize, and making sure the right people understand why it mattered.

Some types of work need more translation than others. If the value is indirect, it helps to make the reasoning visible while the work is happening, not only at the end of the year. Short summaries, clear explanations, and shared material tend to travel better than the original work itself.

It also helps to accept the limits of the system. Not everything valuable will be captured perfectly, and not every evaluation will feel precise.

Over time, many experienced professionals adjust their perspective. The performance review becomes less of a measurement and more of a summary of how their contribution has been understood inside the organization.

A More Useful Way to Look at Performance Reviews

Seen this way, performance reviews are not purely theater, but they are also not precise instruments.

They are a structured way to make sense of something that is inherently difficult to measure. They create a narrative that connects individual work to organizational logic, even if the connection is sometimes imperfect.

So performance reviews are not meaningless, but they describe reality rather than measure it.

And in most cases, the underlying pattern remains simple. Contribution that is easier to interpret is also easier to reward.

It does not mean the system needs to be taken too seriously, but it usually makes sense to understand how it works—and make sure your contribution can be understood within it.

📘 Explore the Topic Further

If this perspective resonates, I explore the same theme in more detail in my Senior Expert Playbook series.

The Senior Expert Career Playbook looks at how expert careers actually develop in practice—covering positioning, visibility, and how contribution becomes understood inside organizations.

The Senior Expert Pay Playbook builds on that and explains how compensation typically forms through perceived impact, trust, and structural alignment, not just performance reviews or negotiation.

Together, the books focus on a simple idea: your work matters, but how it is interpreted often matters just as much.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

That was a slightly optimistic assumption.

In practice, trust sometimes has to be built in situations where the client is not yet convinced. The logo on the slide deck helps a little, but only a little. After that, it is still your own thinking on the table.

For me, this has happened surprisingly rarely. Most client situations have been very reasonable. But one early experience stayed in mind because it made the dynamic unusually visible.

I joined an identity and access management related assignment for a new client. It involved solution design, that would later lead to implementation. The topic itself was new to me, and I joined the team after the work had already started. That already made life a bit more entertaining. Internally, the situation was not entirely simple either. Some colleagues were unsure whether my background was strong enough for the assignment.

During one workshop, I presented a work plan for my part of the assignment. A client representative reacted quite directly and asked something along the lines of whether those words had been “put in my mouth” by someone else.

Not exactly the warmest possible welcome.

It was never fully clear whether the comment was aimed at me personally, the team, or the proposed approach. But it did not matter that much. The point was clear enough: confidence had not yet been granted.

Situations like that are uncomfortable in the moment, but they are also informative. They show fairly quickly how trust is actually built in consulting work. Usually not through titles, and not by sounding offended, but by making the work hold together under scrutiny.

I no longer remember what I answered in that moment. But I do remember how I continued. I treated the situation as a signal that the topic required deeper grounding from my side. I went through the available material, read relevant standards, familiarized myself with the terminology, and worked through the typical solution structures in that area. I also discussed the topic with more experienced colleagues who had worked with similar solutions before. Nothing particularly dramatic, just careful homework.

At the same time, I started putting more effort into making the material as clear and usable as possible. I prepared structured slides and used regular checkpoints with the client to review progress and direction.

The assignment itself was not unusually heavy, which made this possible without wrecking the rest of life in the process.

Over time, the discussions became easier. The structure became clearer. The conversation moved from whether the approach made sense to how it should be implemented. That is usually a good sign. People stop testing whether you know what you are doing and start using the work.

Later in my career, some of the same client stakeholders purchased additional consulting from me several times.

The initial skepticism did not disappear because I argued better. It disappeared because the work became clearer, more concrete, and consistently usable over time.

That is also the broader point of this article. When clients challenge your expertise, the situation may feel personal, but usually it is more structural than that. They are not only reacting to you. They are trying to reduce uncertainty.

Challenge Is Often Part Of The Role

Clients rarely challenge expertise because they want conflict. Usually they are trying to reduce risk.

Consulting work often takes place in situations where the client has to make decisions under uncertainty. They may be investing money, changing processes, choosing technology, or committing to a direction that will be annoying to reverse later. Accepting an external recommendation means accepting some responsibility for its consequences as well.

Testing the consultant’s reasoning is one way to reduce that uncertainty.

The questions may sound blunt. Are we sure this works in practice? Why is this approach better than the alternatives? Have you actually done this before? Why is this necessary? None of these are especially poetic, but all of them are normal.

Behind the questions is usually a practical concern: what happens if this turns out to be wrong?

Seen from that angle, challenge becomes easier to interpret. It is not necessarily resistance, hostility, or some deep philosophical disagreement. Quite often it is just part of how the decision gets made.

Being Credible Includes Being Questioned

Technical knowledge alone rarely resolves these situations.

Clients are often evaluating more than the proposal itself. They are also looking at how the consultant handles uncertainty, disagreement, incomplete information, and a bit of pressure. In other words, they are evaluating judgment, not only content.

Senior experts are not expected to know everything immediately. That fantasy belongs more to PowerPoint than real life. What they are expected to do is remain reasonably stable when the situation is unclear.

Calm reasoning tends to signal credibility more effectively than defensive argumentation. If the consultant gets irritated every time a proposal is challenged, that becomes part of the message too, and not usually the helpful part.

In many cases, the objective is not to win the discussion. It is to help the client understand the structure of the decision. That may mean clarifying assumptions, making trade-offs visible, acknowledging uncertainty honestly, showing how risks can be managed, and explaining why some options are more robust than others.

Trust often grows when the reasoning becomes visible enough that others can work with it.

Credibility Develops Through Interaction

Credibility rarely appears fully formed at the start of an assignment.

It develops through repeated interactions where the consultant’s thinking proves useful. Clear explanations help. Structured material helps. Consistency helps. Prior reputation may reduce initial skepticism, but credibility is still mostly built through usable thinking in the current context.

None of this is glamorous, which is probably why it works.

Over time, the client starts to understand how the consultant approaches problems and what kind of judgment they can expect. Once that understanding forms, the tone of discussion often changes.

Questions become more collaborative. The client stops mainly testing the expert and starts using the expert. That is a much nicer place to work from.

Internal Skepticism Exists Too

Challenge does not always come only from the client.

Consulting firms do their own quiet evaluation all the time. Is this person the right fit for the assignment? Can they handle the topic? Will the client trust them? Will this become a delivery problem three weeks from now? None of this is especially dramatic. It is simply how commercial organizations try to manage risk.

Sometimes the skepticism stays implicit. Sometimes it is expressed a bit more directly. Either way, the mechanism is usually the same as on the client side: credibility develops through visible contribution.

Support from colleagues matters a lot here as well. A consultant does not build credibility only alone in front of the client. Internal trust, backing, and a few sensible people around you help more than people sometimes admit.

Once colleagues see how someone structures a difficult topic, how they communicate under pressure, and whether the work actually lands, skepticism tends to decrease naturally.

Preparation Usually Reduces Tension

Many difficult client situations become easier once the structure of the topic is clear enough.

Preparation does not always mean knowing every detail. More often it means understanding the landscape well enough to explain what is stable, what varies, what depends on context, what usually works, and what tends to go wrong.

Clients rarely expect perfection. They usually expect clarity.

When the reasoning is visible, disagreement often becomes more constructive. People may still disagree, but now they are disagreeing about something concrete rather than reacting to uncertainty in the abstract. That is already progress.

Disagreement Does Not Mean You Are Losing

One common concern among consultants is that disagreement automatically reduces credibility. In practice, respectful disagreement often increases it.

Clients are rarely looking for agreement for its own sake. They are looking for judgment they can rely on when decisions are difficult. If the consultant agrees immediately with everything, the interaction may feel smooth, but not necessarily useful. There is not much value in a very expensive nodding service.

A consultant who can explain why a certain direction may create risk, or why a tempting shortcut may backfire later, can become a valuable counterweight inside the decision process. That is often part of the role.

Trust grows when the client sees that the consultant is able to think independently while still supporting the shared objective.

What Usually Helps In The Moment

When your expertise is challenged, a few practical patterns tend to help:

• Slow the conversation down. When discussions speed up, misunderstandings multiply. A calmer structure often helps more than a faster reply.

• Make assumptions explicit. A surprising amount of disagreement comes from different starting assumptions rather than different goals.

• Separate the proposal from the person. Critique usually concerns the idea, the model, or the plan. It does not have to become a small identity crisis.

• Acknowledge uncertainty openly. Confidence does not require pretending that uncertainty does not exist. Quite the opposite, usually.

• Show the reasoning path. People often resist conclusions less when they can see how those conclusions were reached.

• Do the homework when needed. Sometimes the correct response is simply to learn the topic better and come back stronger.

• Avoid escalation too early. Most situations improve through clarification, not through hierarchy, sharpness, or theatrical firmness.

Credibility Compounds Over Time

Most consulting careers include a few moments where expertise is questioned more directly than expected.

These situations usually feel larger in the moment than they look afterwards. At the time, it can feel like everything depends on one difficult conversation. Later, it usually looks more like one small but useful part of a longer process.

Over time, repeated experience changes the perspective. Challenge becomes part of normal consultant-client interaction rather than some alarming exception. Trust develops gradually, and one conversation rarely determines the long-term outcome on its own.

Still, each conversation contributes something. It shapes how the expert is perceived the next time, and the next time after that. Credibility accumulates through consistent clarity across multiple situations.

And quite often, the strongest signal is simply this: the work holds up when examined closely.

📕Further Reading: My Books on IT Consulting in Discount

Before you go, a small and fairly intentional promotion: the themes I cover in this Substack originally grew into a pair of books on IT consulting.

Technology Consultant Fast Track focuses on getting into the field: choosing the right companies, preparing for interviews, and understanding what kind of career IT consulting can actually offer.

Successful Technology Consulting is about what happens after that: how to earn trust, act like a professional, keep developing, and build a consulting career that is both successful and sustainable.

In that sense, these books are where much of this topic started for me. And despite not being brand new anymore, they are still very relevant.

Both are now available at $0.99 + tax:

Technology Consultant Fast Track
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0918JB48D

Successful Technology Consulting
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B379SWDR

If you have found this Substack useful, there is a good chance you will find something useful in the books too.

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)

Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time

Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)

In theory it should. Senior experts have more experience, more judgment, and often more autonomy than earlier in their careers. But in practice, their calendars often become more fragmented and reactive rather than less.

A typical day has been filled before it even begins. The calendar runs the schedule. One meeting ends, another begins, and the short gaps in between disappear into quick messages, Slack questions, or “just a small thing” someone wants to check.

I see this pattern constantly among colleagues and also on the client side. Some experts seem to be involved in almost everything, all the time. Their names appear in meeting invitations across projects and departments.

The reason is simple. As expertise becomes trusted, demand increases. People start routing more questions, decisions, and problems through you.

The challenge is that it can slowly undermine the core of the expert role.

Trust Creates Traffic

Early in a career, most tasks are clearly defined. Someone assigns work, deadlines are explicit, and the scope is usually limited. The calendar reflects this structure. Meetings exist, but much of the time is still reserved for doing the work itself.

If you work as a consultant, you are often allocated a clear percentage to a specific project. You show up in the project meetings, do the deliverables, and move on.

Later, as expertise deepens, the nature of the requests changes. Instead of tasks, you receive questions. Instead of assignments, you receive invitations. Instead of clear deliverables, people ask for opinions.

You may also accumulate formal or informal areas of responsibility along the way. An application portfolio, a capability area, a technology stack, an architectural domain. Things that suddenly need oversight.

The requests usually sound harmless:

“Could you take a quick look at this?”
“Do you have five minutes to comment on this design?”
“Would it help if you joined this meeting?”

Individually, none of these requests are unreasonable. In fact, they are often a sign that your judgment is valued.

But collectively they create a new pattern. Your time becomes a shared resource.

The Calendar Fills From the Edges

Senior experts rarely lose control of their calendars in a single moment. It happens gradually.

One meeting becomes two. A project discussion turns into a recurring session. A quick review expands into a regular checkpoint. A design discussion turns into a steering group. Over time, small fragments accumulate until the day is divided into narrow pieces of time.

This fragmentation changes the nature of the work.

Expert work often depends on concentration. Preparing extensive offers, designing complex solutions, or framing a difficult client problem all require time to think things through properly. When the calendar is full of interruptions, that thinking becomes harder to sustain.

The expert stays busy, but the work slowly becomes reactive.

When Expertise Becomes a Bottleneck

Another pattern appears as senior experts become more central to important decisions.

Projects begin to depend on their presence. Teams feel safer when the expert is involved. Meetings are scheduled around their availability because the discussion might require their input. Without anyone intending it, the expert becomes a bottleneck.

This is rarely a deliberate design. It is simply what happens when the organization learns that certain problems are easier to solve when a particular person is present.

The result is predictable: more meetings, more requests, and less uninterrupted time.

The Structural Reason

This dynamic is not primarily about poor time management. It is structural.

Organizations rely on trusted experts to reduce uncertainty. When something looks ambiguous, inviting a senior expert to the conversation feels like a safe decision. It increases the probability that the discussion leads to a reasonable outcome.

From the organization’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. From the expert’s perspective, it can slowly erode the conditions required for deep work.

The more valuable your judgment becomes, the more often it gets requested.

Why Control Becomes a Skill

Senior experts who manage to protect their calendars don’t simply refuse work. Instead, they shape how their expertise is used.

It usually starts with understanding where their expertise actually creates the most value—and making that visible to others. If everything looks equally important, everything will eventually end up on the calendar.

In practice, it can take several forms.

Sometimes it means participating in fewer meetings and asking others to formulate their questions more clearly before involving you.

Sometimes it means creating structures—documents, models, guidelines, architecture principles—that allow others to move forward without constant supervision or sparring.

Another approach is to change how people access your expertise. Instead of ad-hoc meetings, you might schedule fixed office hours where teams can bring questions. In other cases, you can ask people to send material in advance and give feedback asynchronously.

It also helps to make decisions visible. When architectural principles, solution patterns, or decision records are documented and shared, teams can move forward without repeatedly asking the same questions.

Some experts also protect a few uninterrupted thinking blocks in their calendar each week. Not as a luxury, but as a condition for doing the kind of work their role actually requires.

Delegation also becomes essential. Many senior experts struggle with it. They are used to solving problems themselves and often remain the fastest person in the room. But if everything still flows through them, the calendar eventually collapses under its own weight.

Over time, managing this dynamic becomes part of senior expertise itself: not only solving problems, but shaping how and when your expertise enters the system.

A Different Definition of Control

Control over a calendar rarely means empty space. In expert roles, demand is usually a sign that the work matters.

The real question is whether the expert is shaping that demand or merely responding to it.

Senior expertise often means becoming a scarce resource in the organization. When that happens, time stops behaving like a private asset and starts behaving more like shared infrastructure.

Understanding this shift is often the first step toward managing it deliberately. Senior expertise is not only about solving difficult problems, but also about shaping how your time and judgment are used inside the organization.

Personally, I have rarely felt overwhelmed by calendar invitations. When my calendar is full, the meetings are usually intentional and necessary. In many consulting roles, discussions with clients and project teams are not a distraction from the work—they are the work itself. Reducing meetings for the sake of reducing meetings rarely improves expert productivity. The real question is whether the right conversations are happening with the right people.

But the same structural dynamic still exists: once people trust your judgment, more questions and decisions start flowing your way. Managing how that demand enters your calendar becomes part of the job.

This is one of the structural challenges I explore in my book The Senior Expert Career Playbook. The book looks at why expert careers often become heavier without becoming clearer—and how experienced professionals can build influence, visibility, and sustainable working conditions without drifting into management roles.

If the topic resonates, you can get the book together with the new The Senior Expert Pay Playbook with launch discount. The bundle combines career positioning and compensation positioning into one practical model for senior specialists. Launch price available via my Gumroad store until April 15.

Launch discount codes:

PAYSTRUCTURE22 – The Senior Expert Pay Playbook
EXPERTMODEL22 – Bundle including both books

📚 Related Reads from the IT Consulting Career Hub

If this topic resonated with you, you might also enjoy:

👨‍💻About the Author

Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.

Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)
Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time
Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)