Advantages of Hiring Software Consultant for the Business
- Software Engineering Consultant: an Overview
- Who Needs a Computer Software Consultant?
- Key Tasks of a Computer Software Consultant
- Difference Between Software Consultants and Software Developers
- Hiring a Specialist from a Software Consultant Company: What Are the Duties and Responsibilities?
- Benefits of Hiring a Software Consultant
- Software Engineer Consultant Salary: How Much Do They Charge?
- Software Consultant Resume – Search for Ukrainian Specialist!
- Software Consultant: Making the Final Decision
Software development is an essential part of any type of business these days. This is an enormous field of knowledge that can eventually be transformed into a finished product with the help of software consulting services. Lately, businesses are becoming more and more complex and require more complex software solutions to build marketplace websites for example accordingly. Hiring a software engineer might not be enough at this point, as not every company’s owner has a decent understanding of what his business needs. This is the point where it is time to consider hiring a software developer subcontractor or to hire a software engineering consultant. However, what is a ‘software consultant company’ and how does it work?
Software Engineering Consultant: an Overview
Over the years, the software consulting services industry grew so much, that it is now able to provide its services to various fields of business. Considering how much computers invaded our lives it was only a matter of time for programmers to become a part of that industry as well. According to Statista’s report, the popularity of such software consulting services is only growing each day. Obviously, such an important and complex field as software development became one of the first ones to offer software consultant services.
There are several reasons that drove the popularity of software development consulting services to the top lately:
- The rapid growth of the IT industry in general and an increasing number of qualified specialists
- Companies trying to become even more competitive by designing their own and unique products that require previous consulting
- Occurring need for narrow-field consultancy
- Growing demand for newly developed decisions within the business field
All of this resulted in the emergence of such job title as ‘software consultant’. A typical representative of this profession is a senior developer with multiple years of experience in his field. This way your consultant will give your business pieces of advice depending on the actual experience that he has, while ordinary software developers might not have that kind of knowledge. The biggest difference though between a software developer and consultant is that the latter spends a lot of his working hours with the client, discussing possible strategies and updates. Due to the fact, those consultants are able to write code as well (if needed), they ensure the perfect transition between the project plan software development stage and execution of the project.
What Does Exactly Software Engineering Consultant Do?
First and foremost – software development consulting is to help a company to use its software as effectively as possible in order for the business to grow rapidly. Therefore, there are many ways that software engineer consultant can help you in: customer support, cybersecurity jobs, tech support, and many others. Usually, a software implementation consultant takes part in various meetings with clients to advise on the best strategy they could choose for their projects. This also includes collaboration with the tech team. The biggest priority of any software consultant company is to provide its clients with exquisite technical expertise.
Nowadays there are plenty of software consultants so sometimes it might be hard to choose the right one for you and your needs. Today there are more than a few types of such specialists, for example, a system integration consultant. This is the exact kind of employee you need if you want your integration processes within the company to be as smooth as possible. This type of specialist will give your company a unique software development consulting solution on how to lead the integration process in your particular case and considering your company’s daily workflow. Eventually, this will give you an advantage against your competitors on the market.
Another type of specialist you might want to consider hiring is an engineering consultant. Dealing with these types of tasks is not easy and requires lots of skills and deep understanding. Not all business owners have that and eventually hiring a consultant might be their best option in such a situation. Not only the project will be taken care of by a specialist, but you will also be able to understand all the specifics of it and how it is integrated into your company’s daily workflow. Just remember to learn about consultant’s necessary skills before actually hiring one.
The path of a software development consultant begins with the decision to work for yourself. Usually, specialists make certain savings before moving to this position. Self-branding for consultants is very important, so they invest most of their money in attending networking meetings, creating business cards, and other components of independent business management, which are important for independent software consultant.
Who Needs a Computer Software Consultant?
TOP software consulting companies are the cornerstones of the American economy. At the moment, there are approximately half a million IT consulting companies, and this trend has gradually taken over the whole world. Computer software consultant mainly works for the management of computer companies and helps them use technology effectively to help grow their business and solve technical problems. Software consulting companies offer their specialists who possess the necessary expertise and information to solve problems. Initially, such specialists could be a computer engineer or computer scientists.
If you hiring a remote consultant software he advises will be more progressive and suitable for business because an in-house IT software consultant may not have all the necessary skills and knowledge to resolve particular difficult cases or to introduce the newest technologies. Unlike in-house workers, a hired IT consultant can provide an objective view of your business and help make the right strategic decisions for the company. In addition, the consultants have deep knowledge in various fields (from healthcare to the blockchain) and rich experience. Hiring an IT consultant is a smart investment solution.
Key Tasks of a Computer Software Consultant
A consultant’s tasks include:
- Building personalized software for a specific task
- Technical support of the client
- Analysis of the company’s computer system and determining the best use of software to improve the work process
The main task of software consulting services is to solve client tasks. The consultant’s functions include the implementation of software that will:
- Effectively solve the tasks set by the client
- Help to find a solution to problems that have arisen in the business.
Software consulting service is a flexible field that includes specialists with multi-skilled skills, high specialization, talent, and abilities. Software consultant offers technical support, customer service, advanced cybersecurity work, fight against hackers, and the protection of the business computer system.
In the past, software consulting services companies created programs for disks and then sold them to customers. Now the business models of the best software consulting companies have changed a lot and offer a much wider range of services and products. These include sales of licensed software, support services, and other services. Companies are constantly changing their approach to SaaS (software-as-a-service), when customers pay for a subscription and use the program while they need it.
The definition of software consulting services can often be heard as focusing on providing advice on how best to use computer consultant software to achieve business goals. There are many such companies now and they all have their own approach in providing such consultations in order to use the software most effectively.
It should also be noted that such specialists can bring existing software products into line with the functional environment of the enterprise in which they are involved. It is possible to develop special programs taking into account the needs and specifics of a particular business area.
Before starting cooperation with any company or individual computer software consultant, it is necessary to clearly convey the goals of your company or business. So, the specialist will be able to ask the right questions and develop a strategy, taking into account client’s views on the business.
Thus, an IT consultant is a specialist who implements a whole range of tasks in order to optimize business processes, develop an enterprise and, as a result, increase profit.
Difference Between Software Consultants and Software Developers
A computer software consultant is, first of all, a contractor who helps to modify the business. They help to replace old workflows with new, more functional and modern ones. In the process, consultants constantly verify their work with the preferences of a customer and take them into account in their future work.
A software developer, in contrast, creates some kind of product. The company may further sell or offer this product as a service. A senior software consultant always works directly with a client, and a software developer works as a team member in a company and does not work directly with customers.
Hiring a Specialist from a Software Consultant Company: What Are the Duties and Responsibilities?
Software consultant companies are rather new on the job market, as is this service in general, so it would be great for you to find out about their specialists’ responsibilities first. So for any software consultant company like that can offer, there is a list of job requirements that he or she has to fill:
- Communicating with new clients and defining their main requirements
- Working with already existing clients on their projects, defining core aspects of those projects
- Managing deadlines for projects, breaking them into smaller tasks for easier execution
- Getting into a deeper understanding of the client’s business specialties to present him with the best software strategy possible
- Defining all the necessary requirements for the soft- and hardware about to be used, as well as network requirements
- Giving a deep analysis of the company’s tech structure and figuring out what could be improved
- Optimizing already existing solutions for better performance
- Implementing changes to customers’ managing systems
- Designing a new system with the following testing and monitoring process
- Presenting results to clients in the form of presentation
As you see, there are quite a few responsibilities of a computer software consultant. However, it would not be fair to call this list complete without one of the main tasks of such specialist – custom software design. This is something many firms are chasing after these days. Custom or bespoke software brings many options and benefits that businesses could not afford before. When you hire a software consultant, you receive access to personalized solutions just for your firm or a particular project. This is a great opportunity for you to not only speed up the production but also to improve your security.
Benefits of Hiring a Software Consultant
Before we move to discuss software consultant rates, let’s get deeper into the benefits of hiring one in the first place. Depending on your company and its needs, it might become your best or the complete contrary – worst decision. So what makes software development consulting so appealing to so many business owners all around the world? Consider these reasons:
- Long warranty. Software developers often do not care a lot about what happens to the software they produce after they have done it. Software consultants are a completely opposite kind of deal. When you are hiring one, you are basically making a long term investment for your business. With such a specialist on your team, no corners will be cut and both of you will be working for a long-term result.
- Objective opinion. Very often business owners are resistant to changes as they are being torn apart between their employees’ needs and the company’s best interests. This way having a meeting with a software consultant will give you an honest insight into your company’s state of the business. More than that, you will also receive professional advice on how to make things better from a long-term perspective.
- Reduced costs. It might not look like that at the beginning, as a software consultant rate is not the lowest one, but it might give you an opportunity to save up a significant amount of money in the long run. How is that possible, you might ask? Well, in case of hiring a typical software development team you receive nothing but a finished product, regardless of how flawlessly everything will be executed. On the contrary, when you collaborate with a software consultant, you receive a long-term plan for your business and its most complicated, technical part.
- Specialized support. Nowadays most software consultancy companies tend to choose one particular field, that they become experts at. This is very convenient for both the executor and the client. This approach is especially valuable when software consultancy company has a team of specialists who currently have a narrow specialty, however, they all have experience in various fields as well. This way they will know how to maximize the capacity of your company’s future software.
- Immediate results. Due to narrow expertise, your software consultant will be able to bring your company or project an immediate improvement on the technical side.
- Free your time. With the assistance of a software consultant, you can focus on core parts of your business without having to worry about your IT development department.
- Achieve your goals. Whenever a company wants to release new software there always are some expectations involved. A competent software consultant will be able to help you meet those expectations.
It is pretty obvious, that hiring a software consultant is highly beneficial for almost any business, especially for large companies who want to stay competitive on the market and attract new clients, instead of losing already existing ones.
Software Engineer Consultant Salary: How Much Do They Charge?
Now we finally got to the most interesting part – software engineer consultant salary. Let’s make a chart to compare rates of specialists from different countries, to see, where is it most profitable IT consulting rates per hour. Please note that all the numbers were taken from Upwork.
United States | Canada | Germany | Switzerland | Ukraine | United Kingdom | |
Software consultant hourly rate | $200 | $150 | $100 | $130 | $42 | $110 |
Also, these numbers are moved to the chart for you to compare.
As you see, a software engineer consultant salary varies greatly from country to country. Why does that happen though? That does not necessarily depend on the quality of the provided service. Quite often the senior software consultant salary depends on his or her country’s economic state. The more developed the country is – the lower will be the price.
When scrolling through the list of software consultant resume, the first thing you should be looking at is the number of projects your candidate has participated in and the set of skills he or she has. The price should not be the most important factor for you to choose your software consultant by.
Software Consultant Resume – Search for Ukrainian Specialist!
Now that you have learned about all those amazing possibilities that hiring a software consultant opens up in front of you, you are probably wondering – what is next? Where do I find that perfect candidate that will help me to bring my business to the top? Well, you could open up any job board and start scrolling through one software consultant resume after another or you could narrow down your search party to one country. However, which one to choose? We advise you to start with Ukraine and we will now tell you why.
Over the last couple of years, Ukraine became one of the most desirable destinations to hire software developers. And not just developers, Ukrainian IT specialists as a whole hold the 11th place in the world’s best programmers list, according to Hacker Rank. Currently, there are more than a thousand Ukrainian IT specialists, ready to be hired, and those numbers will grow at least twice until 2020, as predicts this scientific report.
There is a list of reasons why you should consider outsourcing from Ukraine:
- Reduced prices. Ukraine is one of those countries that have a poor economy and that greatly affects its specialists’ wages. Mostly it is explained by the difference in the currency rate. However, low prices do not mean low quality, so do not let that fool you.
- High education. Ukraine is well-known for its awesome tech specialists, however, not everyone knows that most of them also have high profile education. This way not only you get a high-quality result for a decent price, but your employee will definitely be certified for the job.
- Big talent pool. Ukraine is a paradise for those who are looking for software developers. So if you decide to look in this country, be sure that you will have many specialists to choose from.
- Big tech community. Many annual IT events are being held in Ukraine which in some way makes it a center of the European IT community.
Finding Your Software Development Consulting Dream-Team: Mobilunity
While there are many companies in Ukraine that provide software consultancy services, there is one, that stands out the most today. It is called Mobilunity and it is present on the Ukrainian as well as the worldwide market of IT services since 2010. During a long time of its existence, this company learned how to provide its clients with the best performance and win over loyal customers with ease. Today it is one of the most respectable Ukrainian IT companies that provides various services in this field, as well as providing its clients with the best software consultants. However, there are other reasons why you should consider hiring your software consultants from this company:
- High-level professionals. All consultants that this company has to offer to any of its clients have years of experience working in the IT field and all the necessary certifications.
- 24/7 customer support. Mobilunity cares deeply about its clients so every one of them can get qualified customer support at any time of day and night.
- Lower costs. Mobilunity is a great example of how you combine excellence in execution at a low price. This is one of the many reasons why business owners tend to choose this company over its competitors.
- Big talent pool. Here you can find more than just one candidate for the position, which makes it a lot easier to make a choice and find the perfect employee.
- Convenient location. Mobilunity’s main office is located in the heart of Eastern Europe, which makes it incredibly easy for European clients to outsource their jobs there.
Software Consultant: Making the Final Decision
Keeping a successful business is incredibly hard these days. You have to balance between staying competitive on the market and satisfying your customers. Software, that your company uses, can play a leading role in keeping that balance. That is why many companies now are looking for new ways to make this part of their business work as flawlessly as possible. Hiring a software consultant can be one of the best ways to ensure that in terms of technology your company is going on the right track. Now you know what kind of specialist it is and what he can do for your business. Having learned the prices for his services, we hope it became quite obvious that outsourcing this position to another country would be a smart move, especially if we are talking about Ukraine. If you actually decide to hire a Ukrainian software consultant – make sure that you check out Mobilunity first.
Software consultant at Mobilunity is already waiting for you! Contact us for more details.
Disclaimer: All salaries and prices mentioned within the article are approximate NET numbers based on the research done by our in-house Recruitment Team. Please use these numbers as a guide for comparison purposes only and feel free to use the contact form to inquire on the specific cost of the talent according to your vacancy requirements and chosen model of engagement.