Why you may want to avoid independent consulting, especially overseas

Some things to keep in mind

On the face of it, independent consulting in international development is not an appealing career choice.

You’re on your own, with no institution to back you up.  You’re an outsider, a transient professional, an interloper. You touch down for a few weeks in a foreign country and have little time to acclimatize or develop relationships.  You often find yourself counting on team members who up until yesterday were complete strangers. You have to pray that they’re competent.

Of course, there are plenty of independent consultants for whom their career path was less a choice than a default position. It might have been thrust upon them. They may have originally sought the stability, structure and institutional opportunities that come with being part of a big development agency or a consulting firm of whatever size. But that didn’t happen.

Freedom is not always a blessing

Certainly, independent consulting comes with a lot of freedom. But freedom is only a positive thing insofar as you enjoy being untethered and don’t mind not belonging. There are a lot of reluctant gig workers out there.

Although it is rarely acknowledged, there are non-negligible advantages to being told what to do. A professional life where you can mostly focus on completing the tasks you are given. There is less decision making and need for self-discipline. Plus there is no need to file estimated taxes every quarter (as the self-employed in the US must do).

If, in addition to being an independent consultant, you are so “unlucky” as to work as an evaluator, you can expect to enjoy several additional drawbacks. While it is true that someone is paying you to look into a program or project, to collect data and information and ferret out the truth, a lot of people involved in that program won’t exactly appreciate your poking your nose around and asking sometimes uncomfortable questions.

They say evaluators play the role of “critical friend,” the person you can trust who will also point out your faults. Not everybody is reconciled to that concept. Who likes a party pooper? Who likes to get a diagnosis that they aren’t as healthy as they thought?

In other words, independent consulting ain’t for everyone.

But if you must…

Still, there are rewards to be had. A few of us are out there doing this type of work, after all, and not all of us plan to throw in the towel…

If you happen to fall into the sub-sub-sub-category of a) being a consultant who, b) works independently, c) is active in the field of international development, and d) conducts evaluations; then here are a few observations on what you might face.

Last month, my co-author Svetlana Negroustoueva and I published an article “Bridging divides and creating opportunities in international evaluation consulting” (behind paywall) in the Winter 2019 edition of New Directions in Evaluation, a volume devoted to independent consulting in evaluation.*  

In the article, we discuss common divides and some useful competencies that consultants that belong to the sub-sub-sub category use to navigate them.

We consider various divides that consultants likely deal with while working abroad. We identified divides along cultural, power, gender, national–international, language, geographical lines. None of these are insurmountable but, in one way or another, they require a bit of navigation.

Language is a common and obvious divide. Not speaking the language won’t necessarily prevent you from getting an assignment (except in French or Spanish speaking countries). However, relying on interpreters does pose some risks.  Things do get lost in translation. It adds yet another a layer of complexity to your work.

Because you are not part of the system, probably lack a deep understanding of the country, don’t have the relationships, or necessarily speak the language, you come with a built-in disadvantage.

If you are young and female, you may face further challenges. You may find, at least in some cultures, that you are not taken as seriously as your male counterparts.

Privilege and power – those perennial aspects of life that insinuate themselves into so much of our political and social life – are part of the equation, too. Independent consultants have both more and less privilege and power than meets the eye. On the one hand, as professionals who are independent, well-remunerated, and often based in Western countries, we have certain advantages. On the other hand, we face limitations. As outsiders, (often) not knowing the local language, not have the connections, not the institutional backing that our full-time employed colleagues do, our influence is certainly limited.

Most of the divides we identified spring from disparities between you, the consultant, and the social, political and cultural environment you work in.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

I’ve emphasized the difficult and less appealing sides of independent consulting for two reasons.

If you have doubts about this path, maybe reading this will help you clear them up, and push you in a different direction.

However, if you still think it’s a good idea, then embrace the challenge with open eyes.

On a related note, I like the concept of cognitive disfluency. It refers to the benefits that come from the mental effort of completing a task. If something is too easy to do or to learn, your mind is, according to the theory, less likely retain it. Learning to play the piano is hard. But by practicing day after day, you improve. The same applies to many other skills people acquire. Although a more nebulous skill than mastering a musical instrument, wWorking as an independent consultant, at least until you get the hang of it, is fairly effortful.

This brings me back to our article: we conclude that the very process of overcoming these divides and dealing with these issues can strengthen you as a professional, while also making the work more interesting and enjoyable. There is satisfaction to be had from overcoming life’s tribulations.

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*Junge, N., & Negroustoueva, S. (2019). Bridging divides and creating opportunities in international evaluation consulting. In N. Martınez-Rubin, A. A. Germuth, & M. L. Feldmann (Eds.), Independent Evaluation Consulting: Approaches and Practices from a Growing Field. New Directions for Evaluation, 164, 127–139.