Perhaps the biggest benefit of working as an Black Slate consultant is the variety of projects, technologies, industries, and people you’ll get to work with. Indeed, taking a dip into consulting is a great way to quickly build your skills in many aspects of software development. Moreover, working on different projects keeps things exciting and engaging. Each day at work, you’ll be facing unique technical problems. Within a few months, you might be working on something completely different.

Overall, Black Slate consultants usually work on new development. Our consultants don’t typically undertake maintenance or support roles. As a result, you’ll spend most of your time building new features, instead of supporting legacy code.

Of course, variety brings its own challenges. You’ll need to be highly flexible to meet new demands and learn new skills as projects require them. In addition, you’ll work with many different teams. Therefore, soft skills and communication are critical for our consultants to build trusting relationships with clients over a short period of time.

Just because you’re a consultant doesn’t mean you’re working alone. Black Slate has a great team of consultants with deep experience in software development. When you work as a full-time consultant for Black Slate, you’ll have the support of this team. As a result, you’ll have access to some of the best mentors in the Twin Cities area in terms of software development. Many of our consultants have been with us long term, working on dozens of client projects over that time. So, they have deep expertise and have seen a lot of potential scenarios in development. In addition, many of our consultants also teach classes, so they understand instruction and are great teachers if you need help.

Another major benefit of working for Black Slate is constant learning and improvement. As consultants, we need to stay ahead of emerging trends in software development. In fact, our clients often ask for the most recent technology when they’re looking to deploy a new solution. Given that, you’ll constantly be at the cutting edge of software development as an Black Slate consultant.

Of course, this presents a challenge in its own right. Constant learning isn’t easy, and keeping up with trends does require you invest time in trying and getting up to speed with new technologies. It’s much easier to work on a single project with a well-defined tech stack as an employee at another company.

However, our consultants often see huge benefits in terms of career growth from staying up to date with the latest tools.

Because our consultants often work alongside the client’s development team, you’ll meet a lot of developers working in the Twin Cities area.

Moreover, our consultants also often serve in an advisory role to CTOs or Directors of Software at major firms. These relationships are a key benefit of working as a consultant for Black Slate. As long as you develop and maintain positive relationships, you’ll have a great network thanks to working as an Black Slate consultant.

Our consultants rarely work on time-critical projects. As a result, they work a standard forty hour week and have predictable work schedules. Many of our consultants have families and other commitments outside work. We make work-life balance a priority for our employees. Over the past two decades, Black Slate has won numerous “Best Place to Work” awards thanks to our policies of prioritizing people. Your life outside of work is important to us, and we believe happy employees are better engineers.

Often, our consultants do travel to the client’s office in order to work alongside the client’s teams. These offices range throughout the Twin Cities area. While most of our consultants experience a typical commute, it’s difficult to plan where you’ll be working or move to live close to work because your work site can vary. Changing offices presents a change of pace for our consultants, but for those who prefer a fixed work site, consulting can be a challenge in that regard.