May 2023 – Croixstone

Your Ticket to Career Adventures

“The right boutique consulting partner can serve as your ticket to unparalleled consulting adventures with unique clients who are tomorrow’s economic drivers.”

– Mark Weber (Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Croixstone Consulting)

What is a Boutique Consulting Firm?: A boutique consulting firm is defined as a small or niche consulting firm that specializes in delivering specialized services and expertise to clients in specific industries or functional areas. Unlike larger consulting firms that offer a broad range of services, boutique firms focus on delivering highly tailored solutions and personalized attention to their clients. Croixstone Consulting is a boutique consulting firm that drives business outcomes by accelerating and sustaining transformations for a national portfolio of middle market and large corporate clients.

Opportunities to Apply Your Expertise in New Ways: Many large and boutique consulting firms hire for deep functional expertise in a specific industry. That said, there are firms like Croixstone Consulting which seek to hire highly intelligent professionals who have applied their expertise across a broad swath of industry sectors and company sizes. Croixstone tends to work with clients who value the expertise and diverse perspectives that can be delivered by consultants who bring new insights and best practices that can be adopted from other industries. Innovation is often fueled by this type of approach. And best of all, this approach enables consultants with a sense of adventure to apply their expertise in new, invigorating, and career-building ways.

Consulting Adventures Defined: Since Croixstone’s founding nearly 7 years ago, our consultants have applied their expertise in a variety of adventuresome ways. Examples include:

• Outer Space: We helped to stand up the HR function for a global leader in space exploration.

• The Sun: We helped to optimize operational processes for a fast-growth developer of utility-scale solar farms.

• Planet Earth: We created a technology training program for an organization that studies and documents languages around the globe.

• The Seas: We helped to lead an enterprise Payroll technology project for a global telecommunications company that delivers critical communications services to the maritime sector.

• Your Backyard: We completed market research for a market leader in fencing that is owned by one of the world’s top 10 private equity firms.

• Your Bedroom: We guided a divestiture for one of the largest USA producers of components for the bedding industry.

• Your Medicine Cabinet: We provided Interim Plant Managers to fill critical vacancies for a PE-backed global manufacturer of protective packaging for the pharma and health sectors.

If You are Seeking Adventures in Your Career: We recommend that professionals who crave adventure and continuous learning opportunities in their careers explore the pathways that can be delivered by boutique consulting firms.

Learn more: Read Croixstone’s blog to explore our career-oriented posts on topics including the boutique consulting sector, portfolio careers, artificial intelligence and the career search, the future of work, and much more.

ChatGPT and Job Seekers

“If used as a guide, distiller of content and framework, ChatGPT could have many benefits for its job-seeking users.”

– Robin Reshawn (Executive Career Strategist and Contributor to USNews.com)

What is ChatGPT?: ChatGPT is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and is an artificial chatbot developed by OpenAI. The technology was released in November 2022. ChatGPT has the fastest-growing customer base of any technology in history.

Why you need to become familiar with ChatGPT: As shared by Alan Murray (President and CEO of Fortune magazine), “generative A.I. is likely to have the most profound impact on the business world of any technology since the PC.” Paul Dougherty, CTO of Accenture, said that what is coming is a reinvention “of the way work is done, dramatically amplifying what people can achieve.”

Job Seekers are using ChatGPT: A Forbes magazine article published last month shared that 46% of 1,000 current and recent job seekers surveyed by ResumeBuilder.com used ChatGPT to craft their resumes or cover letters. The job search can be a tedious and time-consuming journey, and ChatGPT can deliver incredible time savings and helpful resume writing capabilities.

Yes, but: If not used the right way, the content delivered by ChatGPT risks being generic and buzzword heavy. Resume writers also risk losing their voice in building what should be a tailored marketing document. We recommend that job seekers regard ChatGPT as a great tool that delivers many benefits, however, it needs to be used with an eye toward understanding its limitations and how to best compensate for its shortfalls.

The bottom line: Job seekers should become familiar with ChatGPT and how to best incorporate the emerging technology into their searches. The experience gained will not only deliver benefits to the job search, but it will also help the job seeker to better understand how the technology might be applied in the workplace.

Learn more: We like the insights shared in a February 2023 article published by USNews.com entitled “Using ChatGPT for Your Resume and Job Search.” Read the article here.

Why the Portfolio Life is Attracting so Many

“I prefer the term “portfolio life” over “portfolio career,” but whatever you want to call it, it’s an opportunity to gain control over your life in the midst of uncertainty and constant disruption.”

– Christina Wallace (Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School and author of The Portfolio Life)

A new way to view career: In launching Croixstone Consulting in 2016, our firm’s co-founders, Patti Weber (CEO) and Mark Weber (Managing Partner), designed a business plan that placed “portfolio professionals” at the center of the firm’s universe. While the concept of “portfolio life” or “portfolio careers” was not well known at that time, the career framework is gaining increasing popularity and adoption by professionals who understand that the future of work demands a new blueprint for architecting one’s career – – and life.

A guide to future-proof your career: Last month, Christina Wallace of Harvard Business School published a fascinating book entitled The Portfolio Life. This on-point book serves as a guide to future-proof your career, avoid burnout, and build a life bigger than your business card.

Definition of portfolio career: We like the following definition of portfolio career as published by Harvard Business Review. Whereas a career path tends to be a singular pursuit (climb the ladder in one direction and focus on what is straight ahead), a career portfolio is a never-ending source of discovery and fulfillment. It represents your vast and diverse professional journey, including the various twists and turns, whether made by choice or by circumstance.

Four pillars of the portfolio life: Christina Wallace advises that the following four pillars are essential when adopting the portfolio life / career:

1. Identity
2. Optionality
3. Diversification
4. Flexibility

Learn more: Learn more about the portfolio life / career framework and the four pillars to adopt this increasingly popular career framework here.