From Billable to Directional: Structuring a Senior IT Consulting Career

Why staying allocated and delivering well is not enough to create a coherent trajectory

Feb 17, 2026

In the previous article, I argued that many IT consulting careers stall not because of lack of effort, but because of lack of structure. Indeed, most senior consultants are competent, trusted, and busy. The work keeps coming. Responsibility increases.

On paper, everything looks stable. Utilization is strong. Clients are satisfied. Nothing is visibly broken. In many firms, that is what success looks like.

And yet something feels off.

From the inside, progress often feels static. Titles do not change. Influence does not expand. The role becomes heavier, but not necessarily clearer or more motivating. You are relied upon—but not necessarily moving n the right direction.

This is where structure starts to matter.

So what actually changes when you add it to your career? Not everything. But the right things.

From Allocation to Direction

Early in a consulting career, the primary objective is simple: stay allocated and deliver well. Billability is survival. If clients trust you and project managers want you on their teams, you are doing something right.

And early on, that is a perfectly valid metric.

I recognize this pattern in my own first years in consulting. Being reliably allocated meant trust. It meant competence. It meant I was contributing. For a long time, allocation felt like progress.

The problem is when this becomes the only strategy.

Many experienced consultants spend years embedded in demanding client projects. They handle complexity, manage stakeholders, and quietly absorb risk. Internally, however, they are simply “well allocated.” Stable. Reliable. Safe revenue.

Only later did I realize that stability and direction are not the same thing.

Early in your career, billability is a reasonable proxy for value. At a senior level, it is no longer sufficient. A senior expert must create value that extends beyond their own hours—by shaping decisions, influencing direction, and strengthening the firm’s long-term positioning, not just delivering inside a single assignment.

Adding structure means shifting the question from “Am I billable?” to “Where is this taking me?”

You begin to evaluate assignments not only by their difficulty or visibility, but by how they build the expertise and positioning you want long term. The same project can either deepen your trajectory or keep you stationary. Without structure, it is difficult to see which.

From Senior Resource to Shaping Force

At some point, many consultants become the person who fixes difficult situations. When a program struggles, they are brought in. When a client escalates, they step forward. They are the safe pair of hands.

This is recognition of competence. But it is also a trap.

If your role is defined primarily as “the person who makes broken things work,” you operate inside other people’s agendas. You react to complexity rather than shaping how complexity is approached.

Adding structure means asking a different set of questions. Am I only solving problems thrown at me, or am I influencing how problems are framed? Am I executing decisions, or helping define them? Am I critical to delivery, or relevant to direction?

The difference is subtle but significant. In consulting firms, that distinction often determines who remains a senior consultant and who evolves into a senior expert whose perspective shapes both client and firm-level thinking.

From Invisible Value to Legible Impact

Consulting organizations reward what they can explain. Revenue growth is easy to explain. New accounts are easy to explain. Team expansion is easy to explain. Expert judgment is not.

Much of senior expertise shows up indirectly: better architectural choices, fewer long-term mistakes, avoided risk. From inside the project, this feels substantial. From a leadership meeting, it may look like “steady delivery.”

I have experienced this myself in my architecture assignments. A significant part of the work is simply making implicit things explicit—mapping dependencies that no one had fully articulated and documenting assumptions that were circulating informally. From the client’s perspective, it is valuable. It reduces future mistakes and prevents avoidable complexity. At the consulting firm, however, it can still look like “another stable assignment.” Nothing dramatic happens—because the confusion had been removed before it could turn into a visible problem.

Structure forces you to think about legibility. Where does my work intersect with decisions that matter? Who inside the firm understands its impact? Can someone describe my contribution in one sentence upward?

Legibility does not mean exaggeration. It means translation. There are some simple ways of doing this. Writing a short internal summary after a demanding assignment. Making explicit what was influenced. Connecting your contribution to the firm’s strategic themes—cloud positioning, industry focus, account expansion. Not loudly. Just clearly.

This is not about self-promotion. You cannot compensate for weak fundamentals with marketing. But if your value cannot be connected to something the organization considers strategically important, it remains local, no matter how technically strong it is.

Senior expertise becomes directional only when its impact is understandable beyond the project room.

From Drift to Deliberate Non-Goals

Most consultants are clear about what they want more of: influence, interesting work, recognition, better compensation. Fewer are clear about what they are not optimizing for.

Without explicit non-goals, availability becomes the default posture. You say yes often enough and gradually become central to everything. But central is not the same as directional.

For me, one important shift happened about five years ago. I became clear that I did not want direct reports or personal sales targets. Not because those roles lack value, but because they would pull my attention away from the kind of expertise I wanted to deepen. That clarity simplified many decisions.

Adding structure means defining that kind of boundaries. Perhaps you are not optimizing for headcount management. Perhaps you are not optimizing for pure sales responsibility. Perhaps you are not optimizing for being the emergency fixer in every complex situation.

These decisions reduce noise. They make trade-offs visible. They prevent your calendar from becoming your strategy.

From Randomness to Internal Logic

Many consulting careers evolve through chance. A project needs you. A client trusts you. A reorganization opens—or closes—a door. You move because something looks interesting, not because it fits a deliberate direction.

I know this firsthand. The core area of my own expertise—enterprise architecture—came from a university project I happened to get involved in early on. It was not part of a long-term strategy. It was simply the only opportunity that appeared. I learned the topic deeply because it was in front of me, not because I had mapped out a future role around it.

For a while, this works. Growth feels fast and organic. You build skill through exposure. You say yes to what is available. Experience accumulates.

Then progression slows down, and it becomes difficult to explain why. Nothing is broken. Nothing is visibly wrong. The stepping stones simply stop appearing.

Structure does not eliminate randomness. Consulting will always involve timing, opportunity, and context. What structure introduces is internal logic. It gives you criteria.

Instead of asking only “Is this interesting?”, you start asking whether it strengthens your positioning, deepens your chosen expertise, or increases your influence in a direction you actually care about. Opportunities are no longer taken at face value; they are interpreted through a defined trajectory.

Over time, this reduces drift. A sequence of projects becomes something more coherent. Not perfectly planned—but internally consistent.

Capability Needs Direction

Structure does not replace capability. You still need strong technical competence. You still need consulting skills. You still need trust.

What structure changes is the presence of direction.

That direction does not have to be a ten-year master plan. It does not require a detailed roadmap or a fixed end title. In consulting, too many variables are outside your control for that to be realistic.

What it does require is clarity at a simpler level:

Clarity about what kind of expertise you want to compound.
Clarity about the types of problems you want to become known for.
Clarity about what you are deliberately not optimizing for.

Without that clarity, your career is shaped mostly by context. You move from assignment to assignment, reacting to opportunity, demand, and availability. You may grow in responsibility, but not necessarily in coherence.

With structure, direction does not mean rigidity. It means internal logic. Projects start connecting. Decisions reinforce each other. Your role becomes easier to explain—to others and to yourself.

Effort builds skill. Structure makes sure that skill is moving somewhere. That is what actually changes.

Over the past few years, I started documenting this shift more systematically—what actually changes when senior expertise stops being accidental and becomes deliberate.

That thinking eventually became The Senior Expert Career Playbook. Not as a productivity manual, but as a structured reflection on how expert careers evolve in real organizations, and how to introduce direction without turning into a manager.

If this topic resonates, the book goes deeper.

✍️ Author News

In a slightly different direction, my debut novel Pohjoisen tie (The Northern Road) will be published in Finnish in March 2026 by Momentum Kirjat.

It’s a psychological and adventurous story about loss, family secrets, and the search for answers. A young woman travels deep into the far North—both geographically and mentally—after receiving an unexpected lead about her father’s disappearance years earlier.

Yes, this is somewhat different from my consulting work.

The book can be preordered directly from me, without commitment. Preordering ensures early delivery at a reduced price, with the option of a signed copy.

More details closer to publication.