GotoDBA Becoming a DBA Consultant

Becoming a DBA Consultant

An introduction to, well, myself

I’ve been a consultant for most of my professional life. I started my tech career back in 1998 as a Windows system guy (helpdesk, IT, assembling and disassembling servers, etc.) in a software and IT department. We were a very young and small department in the organization and about a year after I started the head of the department realized that we use Oracle databases a lot but we don’t know enough about them. I was offered a promotion to become the small IT team leader as well as becoming the department DBA, and I went for it.

When I left that team, I found a role in a remote DBA team, working with all kinds of clients. At the beginning I was working mainly from the office doing maintenance, upgrades, installation, support, etc., but after about a year I started going to clients and pretty quickly found myself full time out of the office working on various projects at the clients’ sites.

After about 3.5 years I moved to my next role with a consulting company, managing the Oracle DBA consulting team. Another 2 years and I joined another consulting company right at the beginning of its journey. This time as one of the owners and VP Professional Services, responsible for the consulting in the company including managing and training our consultants, managing relationships with clients, etc.

With my move to Canada I became an independent consultant, working on some projects I had in the past and starting new projects with new clients.

During all these years, I encountered countless scenarios with other consultants, managers, DBAs, developers and many, many more. Some of these encounters were friendly and productive, some included more and less pleasant communications, interviews (being on both sides of the table) and more.

This post will start a series about becoming and being a consultant, either as an employee of a company or as an independent consultant. I’ll try to include as many aspects of it as possible. If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to leave them here or contact me using the contact page.

Challenges

Being a consultant brings many challenges (and sometimes frustration), but also rewards. Some of these are generic to any consultant, regardless of their employment type, and some are specific to self-employed consultants.

Some of the challenges are technical like:

  • Knowing a lot about the product you consult on
  • Having experience with many features
  • Being familiar with many different versions of the product
  • Understanding the infrastructure and the “surrounding” of your expertise (for example, a DBA consultant should be familiar with different operating systems and storage subsystems)

And some of them are not technical at all, like:

  • Being able to understand a problem when presented by the client (not always as easy as it sounds)
  • Communicating with the different stake holders (from users through DBAs and IT personnel to managers)
  • Handling all kinds of different characters – some you’ll find easier to work with, some are quite difficult
  • Being political

Becoming a consultant

When thinking about becoming a consultant there are a few topics to discuss:

  • Bureaucratic processes (specific to self-employed)
  • Marketing yourself (mainly for self-employed, but not only)
  • Technical skills
  • Personal skills

Bureaucratic processes

When you plan to become a self-employed consultant, there is some bureaucracy involved. This process is different from country to country, so I can’t cover it here, but this is a short list of things to check:

  • What does it mean to be self-employed? Do you need to register somewhere?
  • Invoices format and collecting payments
  • Managing expenses and accounting
  • Taxes
  • Insurance (health, professional, etc.)
  • Retirement and unemployment (as this is usually different for self-employed and “regular” employees)
  • What happens if you don’t have enough income? Getting things going might take a while

Marketing

As self-employed person, this part is important as you have to find your own work. However, as an employee of a consultancy company this is also important, as the consultants themselves are the face of the company.

To be honest, I’m quite bad at this part, so I don’t think I’m the right person to write about it, but it’s something that you should do in order to get new clients. I will cover in the future some topics related to this, like introduction meetings with new clients.

Technical skills

This is quite obvious. When you are a consultant, people expect you to know what you’re talking about and be very experienced in your field (even though I’ve met consultants that are neither). For this, you need to keep learning by: reading (documentation, blogs, articles), listening (podcasts, technical sessions, attending conferences) and experimenting (installing the product and playing with stuff). There is a lot of information out there.

Personal skills

After this long intro, this is the thing I’d like to focus on the most, as I’m not sure that are lots of resources about this specific skill in our specific field.

When you’re a business consultant, the management invites you to perform some sort of a process while they are the clients. When you’re a legal consultant, you are hired by a person or a company to advice on a specific issue and they are your clients. With IT it’s different; you are hired by a manager, but your real client is usually their team. It’s almost never “please come and help ME with something”, it’s usually “please come and help MY TEAM with something”. This is not always the case of course, depends on the company size and type (I’ll get into this in the future), but it happens a lot. In this case, the people that you work with are usually not the ones that hired you, and sometimes are even intimidated by you (which in some cases leads to difficult situations).

What’s Next

This is only the opening post for a series I’m working on. I have lots to write about and I’ll publish more topics soon (the upcoming one and a list of the already published ones can found below). If you have questions, please leave them as a comment below and if you’d like to get updates when I’m publishing more posts, subscribe to my list by filling out the form below.

Get updates when I publish new posts – subscribe here:


Becoming a Consultant series:

Upcoming post: Communication

All posts:

1 thought on “Becoming a DBA Consultant”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *