Technology Strategy Consulting

Technology strategy consultants advise organisations on the big decisions about technology: what systems to buy or build, how to restructure an IT department, whether a digital product is worth investing in, how to modernise ageing systems, or what an AI or cloud plan should actually look like. They work on time-limited projects for client organisations - banks, retailers, government departments, utilities, healthcare bodies - usually as part of a small team, producing analysis and recommendations that senior client executives use to decide where to spend money. It sits between pure management consulting (business problems) and technical delivery (actually building the thing): you are shaping the plan rather than writing the production code.

Starting salary: £30k–£45k
Live graduate jobs: 2 open now
Main way in: Graduate schemes at the large professional services and…
They usually ask for: Degree subject usually does not matter much

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £30,000–£45,000 to start, though this varies widely by firm type, team and location. Large London-based consultancies and strategy-focused arms sit at the upper end or above it; smaller or regional consultancies and public-sector-focused teams tend to sit lower. Bonuses, signing payments and benefits differ a lot and can shift the total meaningfully.

What you'd actually do

Interviewing people at a client organisation - IT managers, finance staff, call-centre team leaders - to work out how a process or system currently works, then writing up what you heard into a clear picture of the 'current state'
Building and maintaining spreadsheet models: cost of running existing systems versus a proposed replacement, headcount implications, phasing of spend over several years, business case numbers that will go to a client board
Making slides. A lot of slides. Turning messy analysis into a tight argument a client executive can follow in ten minutes, and redrafting it repeatedly after review by a manager or partner
Desk research and benchmarking - reading vendor documentation, market reports your firm subscribes to, regulatory guidance - to work out what options exist and what peers in the sector are doing

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Running or supporting workshops: setting up the room (or the Teams call), capturing decisions, chasing the actions afterwards, keeping a project plan and risk log up to date
Internal work between client projects - contributing to a proposal for new work, writing a short point-of-view document on a technology trend, or helping with recruitment and training
Travel or hybrid working to client sites, which varies hugely: some projects are mostly remote, others expect you on site several days a week, sometimes away from home during the week

How graduates get in

Graduate schemes at the large professional services and consulting firms are the main route - technology consulting or technology strategy intakes, usually recruiting in the autumn for the following September, with online tests, a video or recorded interview, and a case-study assessment centre
Summer internships (usually after the penultimate year) are a very common feeder - a strong internship often converts straight into a graduate offer, and at some firms this is where most of the intake comes from
Direct entry as an analyst at a boutique or specialist technology consultancy, or at a technology vendor's own advisory arm. Less structured hiring, often advertised ad hoc rather than on a fixed graduate cycle
Sideways entry after a couple of years elsewhere - from software engineering, IT operations, data analysis or an in-house graduate scheme at a bank or retailer. Common, and sometimes easier than competing for a graduate seat

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In-house strategy or 'transformation' teams at large companies, which take graduates and do similar work for one employer rather than many clients
A master's or MBA is an entry route at the more senior end, but for undergraduate entry it is not required and rarely gives much advantage

What employers ask for

Degree subject usually does not matter much. Firms hire computer scientists and engineers alongside historians, economists and physicists. Some technology strategy teams do prefer a numerate or technical degree because of the subject matter, but plenty do not specify
A 2:1 is the typical bar, and some firms still screen on UCAS points or A-level grades, though a growing number have dropped or relaxed those filters. This genuinely varies firm to firm
Evidence you can handle numbers - not a maths degree, but comfort with quantitative reasoning, since online tests and case interviews lean heavily on it
Some demonstrated interest in technology: a project, a society, a part-time coding habit, a dissertation touching on digital topics. You do not need to be able to build systems, but you need to be able to talk credibly about them

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Security clearance is required for a lot of UK public sector and defence work, which generally needs UK residency over a set period. Firms will tell you if a role depends on it
Professional qualifications are not usually a precondition. Once in, people often pick up cloud certifications, Agile or project management credentials, or in some firms an accountancy or similar qualification if the team sits inside a wider professional services structure

Skills that matter

Structuring a messy problem

Clients arrive with a vague worry ("our systems are holding us back") and your job is to break it into answerable questions before any analysis starts - this is what case interviews are testing for.

Spreadsheet modelling

Business cases, cost comparisons and migration plans live in Excel, and a junior consultant who can build a clean, checkable model gets handed the interesting work.

Writing a slide that makes one argument

Recommendations are delivered as decks, and the discipline of a single clear message per page with evidence under it is the core craft of the job.

Enough technical literacy to ask good questions

You need to understand roughly what cloud migration, APIs, legacy mainframes or data platforms involve so you can challenge a vendor's claims and not be baffled by the client's engineers.

Handling senior people and awkward rooms

You will interview people who suspect your project might cost them their job, and you need to get honest information without being combative.

Working to deadlines you did not set

Projects have fixed client milestones, so prioritising ruthlessly and flagging early when something will not be ready matters more than perfectionism.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Analyst or graduate consultant for roughly the first couple of years - doing analysis, research and slide production under close supervision, usually with a formal promotion cycle once a year
Consultant or senior consultant - owning a workstream, managing the client relationship for part of a project, starting to direct a junior's work. Most people reach this within a few years, though firms differ on titles and pace
Manager - running projects end to end, responsible for whether the work is delivered and profitable, plus involvement in selling the next piece of work. This is the point where many people decide whether consulting is a long-term career
Senior manager, then director or partner - increasingly about bringing in revenue, owning client relationships and building a specialism. Timelines to partner vary enormously and many people never take this path by choice
Exit into industry is extremely common and entirely normal - in-house strategy, digital transformation or product roles at a client-type organisation, technology vendors, private equity portfolio work, or startups. Many people leave somewhere between the two and six year mark, and firms expect it

What people get wrong

“You need to be a strong programmer, or conversely that you can get by knowing nothing technical.”

Neither. You rarely write production code, but you do need to understand what a system does, what a migration involves and what a vendor is actually promising - otherwise clients and their engineers will not take your recommendations seriously.

“You arrive and advise chief executives on strategy.”

In the first year or two you are mostly doing the groundwork - interviews, data cleaning, cost models, formatting and reformatting decks. Client exposure grows steadily, but the glamorous version of the job is several promotions away.

“It is all big-picture thinking and no delivery.”

Much of the UK market blurs strategy and implementation. Firms sell strategy work partly to win the much larger delivery programme that follows, so you may well find yourself on an implementation project, running a plan rather than designing one.

“Hours are brutal everywhere, all the time.”

Hours are project-driven and genuinely uneven. Pitch weeks and deadlines can be long; other periods are close to normal. It varies a lot between firms, teams and sectors - public sector projects are often more predictable than deal-related work.

Where this varies

The label covers quite different jobs. At large professional services firms, technology strategy often sits next to huge implementation practices, so your work may shade into programme delivery and the teams can be big. At small strategy boutiques, teams are tiny, the work is shorter and more purely advisory, and you get client exposure far earlier but with much less formal training. Technology vendors' advisory arms will steer towards their own product ecosystem. Sector matters too: financial services work is heavily shaped by regulation and risk; public sector work involves procurement rules, security clearance and longer timescales; retail and consumer work moves faster. Geographically, London dominates, but there are substantial consulting bases in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Bristol and Belfast, often with lower pay but also lower travel demands and lower cost of living.

See all 2 live Technology Strategy Consulting jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.