As the number of blue-collar workers has fallen, the number of people whose job it is to provide advice and such has increased. This is not necessarily a bad thing; were it not that they mostly kick in open doors or fail to see beyond their own noses. We will discuss two variants of these professions, the coach and the consultant.
It should be noted that the author has had over 2 decades of experience in dealing with these, not all of it voluntarily. There is a real difference between educated coaches and those that simply like to talk: Educated ones can be of real value.
Consultant
These are the outsiders, who get paid to weigh in on a company`s difficulties or just something management wishes to have a third party`s view on. On its own nothing seems wrong; a potentially useful profession. The problem which we at Opinion Economics have with consultants is that they have a habit of providing information that any person in the client company could reasonably have given as wel. Their only function is to provide supporting documentation for boardroom decisions. As for the cost; it is usually based on billable hours, so easy to inflate, resulting in less money for either shareholders or other forms of ownership.
They have one redeeming quality: You are only bothered by them when upper management decides to hire them. Therefor it might be an opportunity to show how willing you are to play along and successfully implement, after discussing everything thoroughly, their findings.
Coach
A coach is someone who advices on matters concerning private individuals, based on their own experience, which tend to be lacking. The demand for them has always baffled the author as there is rarely any research or pencing done by the coach; they just say something which you are then under some sort of obligation to get to work on.
As stated earlier, these can be forced on you: In these cases you do not have a choice and not doing as they state, does leave you at risk of losing your job. So you always have to be careful when it wasn`t your idea to work with one.
The sole way of dealing with them is only willingly accept if you yourself do not have a good answer to the posed question. In other cases just carefully object to the coach and work with the hired nincompoop.
A very relevant difference from consultants: Coaches do not provide supporting documents, their sole function is soothing your superiors into thinking that you are being helped. Regrettably managers will prioritise coaches findings just as much as they do with consultants, so be careful not to annoy the coach to much
