Learning for a living: How to succeed as an IT consultant

In a recent episode of the First Person podcast we met with Derek Ashmore. Derek is a career-long IT consultant. He told us that a career as an independent can be fulfilling and lucrative, if you are prepared to continually learn, and share your knowledge. He said that the joy of his career has been building a network of smart people with whom he can exchange ideas and insights.

You can view our interview here, listen to it here, or watch in the box below:

Learning for a living

“I learn for a living. That’s what I do,” Derek told us. He said that the nature of being a consultant is that you need to be continually acquiring knowledge in order to share it with your partners and customers.

“I take time to give the people I work with the benefit of those learnings,” he said. “But I learn for a living and I have been doing that throughout my career.”

That wouldn’t be right for everyone. Derek told us that corporate life didn’t suit him because he wasn’t always the best at toeing the line or playing the right kind of politics. On the flip side, being a contractor fits with his personality. He said he gets bored easily, and needs to be learning from the people he works with – regardless of their status or stature.

“If I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m in the wrong room,” he said. “After a few years in one space I get bored. I’ve migrated from mainframes to client server development to relational database administration to Java development and architecture, to the cloud and then to artificial intelligence.”

You can’t do that in a linear corporate career (if such a thing still exists).

Derek said that as an independent motivation has to come from within. And for him that brings us back to the idea of lifelong learning and improvement: “I can get better. That’s just my nature.” (See also: Having it all: How to be a technology expert and a business leader.)

Timing is everything

It could all sound somewhat self congratulatory. But Derek told us that continual learning includes admitting to and learning from mistakes. Part of the ‘I can get better’ mantra.

“There has never been something that I’ve done that I looked at and I couldn’t have done it better,” Derek said. “That just doesn’t happen.”

I asked him for examples.

“I was fortunate enough to spot the whole microservices trend early on. I quickly realized that microservices had limitations. Not everything deserves to be microservices. I hit that trough of disillusionment before everybody else did,” he recalled.

So just as the world got turned on to microservices, Derek was advising against.

“It was a business failure for not sticking with that scene longer when it caught on because I could have capitalized on it much more than I did,” he said. But Derek learnt an important lesson he has taken with him. Nothing is perfect.

“I learned that timing is an issue as to what’s a good idea and what’s not.” (See also: How to be a great Chief Product Officer.)

Building the network

Even working for himself, as an IT consultant Derek is not alone. He has business partners, yes, but he also has decades of connections in his network. So how did he get started?

“I started working with an independent consultant (whilst in corporate life). They turned me on to the fact that you have other options. You do not need to climb the corporate ladder,” Derek told us. “Consulting fit me and my attitude towards learning new things because it’s your job to do that in that kind of realm.”

The job is to learn and to share learning, Derek said.

“It is a two-way street. I contribute to the conversation as well as learning,” he told us. “Everybody has things that they do well and things that are challenges to them. I look for people who are complementary. There are places where I can help others out in addition to they can help educate me on different points.”

Derek told us he is never afraid to reach out and ask for help. In part this is because he never turns down a request for help. It’s all part of the process.

“If somebody needs help or needs assistance, I work on the theory that good will will come back to me at some point,” Derek told us. “I always volunteer to help others and where I need help on a specific topic, somebody’s willing to help me with that.”

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