Have you recently met the job title functional consultant? Do you want to discover this job vacancy to be able to determine your chances? The Senior functional consultant job description is considered as a growing job in the market.
To begin in this career, you should know all the different aspects of this job, starting from the job description, until discovering the responsibilities, duties and skills in order to make sure that you will be the perfect candidate to all employers’ culture, requirements and needs. But how to know all this information, just continue reading this article and you will find all the required data concerning the senior functional consultant.
Table of contents
What is a senior functional consultant?
The senior functional consultant is the person responsible for planning, designing, and maintaining the different software to the clients. He works in creating the suitable software for each business model to fit their requirements. This software will help any organization in enhancing their work flow in the way that offers the company the highest returns.
Senior functional consultant job description
Being a senior functional consultant, you have to work in delivering the clients’ requirements in terms of creating the reasonable software starting form planning until launching it in the company and offer the training to the company’s employees to know how to use it.
The Senior functional consultant job description is a growing field that has a remarkable increase in demand on the market. So, if you want to become a senior functional consultant, stick to this opportunity. But first, you have to go in depth in the duties, responsibilities and skills.
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Senior functional consultant duties and responsibilities
The senior functional consultant must do some responsibilities and duties to each client that he cooperates with him. These duties translate by the end of the work the main objective of hiring a senior functional consultant in each company.
- Listen to the clients carefully to be able to understand all of his requirements.
- Plan: to create any software, you should put your plan that fits with your objectives. This plan will achieve your objective by the end of the project.
- Design: after finalizing the planning comes the designing. The design is about to draw the plan on the design to link each category on the software with each other to form the workflow.
- Implement: the final step after planning, designing is the implementation. In this phase, you start to launch your system on the company by offering the suitable training to the employees in order to use this software correctly and achieve the objectives of this software.
- Study the industry well: With each client, you have to know the industry, discover all the simple details related to the company. Then, you will be able to understand the company, the workflow to be able to design the software suitable to this culture.
- Know the clients needs: to be able to deliver the clients requirements, one of the most important duties of the senior functional consultant is to know all the details about the client’s needs, take notes, schedule multiple meetings with the clients in order to know all his requirements.
- Create a system suitable with the business requirements: as we mentioned before, the senior functional consultant must create a software for his client in the manner that fits with the business needs and requirements to achieve by the end of the project the highest return and productivity to the company while using easy, simple and efficient software. So, by creating a software suitable with the business needs, you are now on the right job description of the senior functional consultant.
- Offer the training: also, the senior functional consultant job description includes certainly the training to the company’s staff in order to understand the software, all the simple tricks and how to use the system in the right manner to achieve the company’s objectives.
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Senior functional consultant skills and personality traits
From the other side, to be a senior functional consultant, you have to improve some of your skills and personal traits to meet all the requirements of this job description. As, the skills are the most important indicator to each company during choosing the perfect candidate. The candidate should meet these skills to be able to deliver the duties of the senior functional consultant very well. Between these skills are:
- Research skills: one of the most important skills is to be able to search in the right way to find out the best solutions suitable with the company strategy and objectives.
- Listening skills: this skill is considered as a skill required of the senior functional consultant and a duty that any senior functional consultant should do in each project. The importance of this skill appears on the special request of each company as per their objectives and requirements. So, listening to your clients will help you to know all the requirements on details then start to work based on these requirements.
- Knowing the meaning of the workflow: you should design and create a software to a company that creates the link between the different departments in the company and facilitate the workflow, so, you must have a deep knowledge of the importance of the workflow and how it is run.
- Communication skills: the importance of the communication skills appear during communicating with the clients to find out the best solutions that fits with their requirements.
- Thinking skills: To be able to think and to find the best solutions towards the insights that you already have.
- Interpretation skills: to interpret the clients’ needs from the first sight without wasting time.
- Knowledge of software usage like oracle systems, SAP, or ERP: to be able to create the different software correctly.
- Configuration: As a senior functional consultant, you should have a strong knowledge about configuration to be able to configure systems.
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How do you become a senior functional consultant?
To become a senior functional consultant, you should earn a bachelor degree. As mentioned in the different job description, you will find that the bachelor degree is the most important requirement during hiring a senior functional consultant. No company accepts a candidate without a bachelor degree specified in this field. Also, a training or a diploma degree will be an added value for your career path.
From the other side, a senior functional consultant must have previous functional experience. So, before being a senior functional consultant, you should have a mixture between the bachelor degree and the professional experience in the field.
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What consultant/team leads do
After being a senior functional consultant, you will be able to certainly be a functional consultant team lead. So, you should do different multiple tasks and duties. But the essential role is to monitor all the projects by reviewing the projects, the insights, the documents and the financial reports.
The functional consultant team leader monitors all the previous documents by gathering the data from the different resources like research, interviews, meetings and surveys.
Also, a functional consultant team lead communicates with the clients in order to know all their requirements, supervises the team members, puts the plan for each project, distribute each projects to the team members, checks all the outputs from the team, creates a healthy work environment and identifies the needs of the team to improve the performance of the team on the different projects in order to help the company growth.
What are the duties of an associate consultant?
An associate consultant should do multiple duties on a daily basis, between these duties:
- Gather data from the different channels.
- Analyze data.
- Manage the different projects.
- Offer the recommendations in order to help the team to improve their performance.
- Establish a regular report to show to the team the situation of the different project.
- Lead interviews with the clients to collect all the required data about their needs.
- Check the projects finalized to meet the clients’ specifications.
- Offer the perfect solution to the team and the clients.
- Create the communication link between client and the team to have a strong relationship.
- Schedule meetings with the clients regularly.
- Assist on meetings to discuss the projects’ issues.
- Put a strategy for each project.
- Do the required documentation to deliver by the end the clients’ requirements.
- Check all the projects in terms of quality standards.
- Monitor all the issues of the projects.
- Work in delivering the projects in the right time.
- Do the different analytical processes.
- Monitor the documentation process for the future reference.
- Do the required training for the employees.
- Communicate with the sales team to know all the data about the new clients.
- Cooperate with the human resources department to do the interviews of the new employees.
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How a consultant compares
A consultant works generally in comparing the different projects to choose the suitable one with the company’s strategy. So, he starts to collect all the data and the information to start to compare between them.
Also, the consultant compares the different strategies, and plans to execute the right strategy based on the clients’ requirements.
So, a consultant works generally in doing multiple comparisons in order to apply the right strategy and plan from each project and finally helps the company’s growth.
Functional consultant resources
Each job description has its own tools and resources that help them to finalize all the job responsibilities. The same case is applied with the senior functional consultant job description. For the senior functional consultant, they are many tools and resources, and the top resources are:
I love oracle where you will find multiple pieces of advice, tips and tricks, blog posts related to this domain.
SAP Blogs: in this site, you will find the most updated news related to the senior functional consultant job description.
LinkedIn: Also, LinkedIn includes multiples public figures that provides to the public many information and data in this domain
Functional consultant books
From the other side, many books will help you in increasing your knowledge. The most famous books are:
SAP: How to Write an Interface Functional Specification (The Consultant’s Guide Series Book 2)
Oracle EBusiness Suite Essentials for Implementers Certification Examination Practice Questions
Senior functional consultant salary
The average salary of the senior consultant is $103,000 per year. But you have to take into consideration that the salaries differ between the company size, your experience level.
What is the difference between business analyst and functional consultant?
The difference between a business analyst and a functional consultant is a big difference. A business analyst in a wide range domain, he works basically on doing the required analysis related to the business to offer the suitable solution to the whole business.
From the other side, the functional consultant works as we mentioned before in creating the software based on the clients’ requirements so the functional consultant works in analysis of the technology and software to deliver the perfect solutions to each company based on their industry.
In conclusion, technology becomes important in each company, so hiring a senior functional person becomes necessary. If you have all the skills and the requirements to become a senior functional consultant based on the job description, don’t hesitate to join this career path.
