Akın Deniz Heper
Yale-NUS College
Singapore (1.3° N, 103.8° E)

featuring Christian Keller, Solution Architect, Alight Solutions, Miami (25.7° N, 80.1° W)

Chris Keller works in consulting, where professionals solve business problems specific to clients and recommend possible approaches for better working conditions or higher efficiency in the workplace. 

Chris Keller attended Rice University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. During his time at Rice, he experienced the culture of research work, notably as a part of the American Planning Association, as well as the culture of the nonprofit sector. Though he believes research work and nonprofits are truly valuable, the slow pace of such work pushed him to try out the for-profit world, culminating in his employment as a consultant at Alight Solutions, formerly Aon Hewitt.

The consulting field is borne out of temporary needs for expertise from businesses, where full-time employment of specialists is not an efficient solution, and this expertise is outsourced to consulting firms. This is an industry that requires, as Mr. Keller emphasized, soft skills such as critical thinking and self-awareness, as well as fondness of teamwork; data analysis is also a huge part of each project. Since the field involves working with clients to provide solutions to the individual problems of each project, there is a high amount of variation in the daily routine. Though there are frequent periods where the industry requires one to work on the road, the working conditions are also a lot more stable than some other fields requiring similar skills, such as entrepreneurship. Mr. Keller remembered his father, an entrepreneur working in real estate, having to leave the house on a Sunday to fix whatever pressing issue had arisen at the time. Unlike entrepreneurship, the amount of time consultants spend on any specific company or client is measured in months or, sometimes, in weeks.

Mr. Keller has been a part of Alight Solutions, formerly Aon Hewitt, for the past six years, during which time he has held numerous positions. He decided to join the company upon graduation after witnessing its company culture. He emphasizes the informal and human approach of the company, and he said that the focus on actual performance and capacity for teamwork was the deciding factor for him. He remarked that there is “just a more informal approach, it’s more based on your actual capabilities and your down-to-earthiness,” and he pointed out that even on performance evaluations, how well one fits into the working environment is a major point of consideration. This makes Alight Solutions an efficient workplace for consultants and ensures each team can work efficiently.

Mr. Keller focuses on providing software solutions for “back-office” problems, which, in practice, involves mostly finding and configuring suitable software for the individual client. Familiarity with the software market is thus a valuable resource for him, however the requisites of the field in general vary greatly, aside from the soft skills listed above, due to the range of possible fields of specialization. Consulting, by definition, is a very diverse field, where firms can specialize on more or less anything a company could need help with. The largest companies, such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Accenture, can specialize in multiple fields, ranging from private equity to agriculture or public policy.

The diverse nature of the consulting field means making predictions of the future is especially difficult and each specialty has its own challenges to be overcome. Increasing automation in the workplace and data security are two issues shared across most fields, however; the latter is especially relevant for Mr. Keller and his colleagues, as their work often involves sensitive information from employees of their client companies. Overall, consulting firms are likely to continue their growth in prominence, as their client pool ranges from individuals, to companies, to governments, and the expertise they offer is unlikely to become insignificant or replaced by alternatives any time soon.

A Forbes article from a senior consultant regarding the working requirements and conditions of the field:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2012/11/02/is-consulting-right-for-you

An online consulting service defines what consulting entails:
https://www.consulting.com/what-is-consulting-definition

A post on the UK’s consultancy platform detailing the most common types of consultants:
https://www.consultancy.uk/career/types-of-consultants

Highlights from the interview:

How did your community, or life circumstances as you were growing up, lead to your current career? What was expected of you? How well did you fit into that, or did you end up completely straying away from that?

My dad was an entrepreneur who started his own business well before I was born and then continued to run that up until right around the time I was born with my mom, and then sold it and moved into commercial real estate in Florida, which is obviously not a bad business to be in in Florida. Then he continued to run his own business in Florida when I was growing up, so I saw how entrepreneurship worked…entrepreneurs, you tend not to get a day off. Days off are very few and far between when you get them, because you run the whole business yourself, so that probably colored a lot of me not wanting to be an entrepreneur… Obviously it can be very lucrative, can be very good financially for your family, but from a lifestyle perspective, it can be a little stressful…My mom worked in college admissions for the University of Delaware, that was her career trajectory before she helped my father with his business, so she knew what possibilities undergraduate studies could offer people, and she really helped encourage me to look beyond whatever I was thinking and, in particular, encouraged me to go into liberal arts—just to be able to explore a bunch of different topics.

So, I took her advice. She told me to also get out of Florida while I could, ’cause she said you need to experience something other than Florida. I was accepted to the University of Florida, but I got into Rice instead, and was fortunate enough to get some scholarships, and went there, and never looked back. I had a great experience.

At what point through this journey did you start to think of yourself as following consulting? Were you planning to go into this field?

I actually never even considered it up until—probably until my senior year of college when I started looking for jobs. In college I wanted to major in politics. A big draw for Rice for me was they had the James Baker Institute of Public Policy [James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy], so…I went to Rice wanting to do that. I studied that, got a major in political science, graduated with that…but the more I learned about that world, I guess, the less it was appealing to me. It was a little too slow for me, I guess, the pace of it…When you think about, the research projects, there’s just so much that goes into it. It’s usually multiple years, it’s usually having to do your due diligence, and just do a ton of research and then write, and then do a ton more research, and then write, and then get a bunch of feedback, and rewrite, and those kinds of things. So, I got that experience, and it just—I couldn’t see myself doing that as a career.

I also worked for some nonprofits when I was at Rice. I did a lot of volunteer work through the university, as well as some of the other community-based organizations in Houston, so I got to see, similarly, the nonprofit culture…while I think it’s very important, I think for me…it wasn’t as fast paced as I had hoped it was going to be. I got into my senior year and decided I should try something really different, just try the for-profit world, give it a try…here I am, six years later, still doing it.

What does your current position entail? What are you doing on the job?

I’ve been at the same company for six years now— Alight Solutions. It used to be Aon, which is a large insurance company, and prior to that, it was Hewitt Associates, which was a large benefits software and services company before that. In the six years I’ve been with them, it’s felt like three different companies, and as I was looking back on it, I’ve actually had probably five different jobs in the six years I’ve been there. So, it’s felt a little different…a typical consulting arrangement, it’s usually—in management consulting, in particular—you go out and you get staffed on a project. You do whatever is required to solve that client’s particular business problem. It’s usually gathering data, gathering due diligence from them, running some kind of data analysis, and then gaining some insight from that, providing analysis back to the client, maybe some recommendations of what they should do for their business.

The company that I’ve worked for the past six years is more specifically focused on software. In particular, software for big companies. Software focused on their finance, accounting, payroll, HR—what in the corporate world they would call “back-office” stuff. It’s the stuff that has to get done to make your company run, but it’s not necessarily core to your business.

I started out doing software implementations, so a customer would come and say, “Okay, we want to put in a new HR system, or payroll system, or benefits system, and we want you guys at Aon Hewitt—or now Alight Solutions—to do that for us. We like your software. We want you guys to put it in.” A lot of my role was asking them, “What does your company need us to do for you?” and then we go back and configure the software to do that, set it up, and then get it live for our clients. I started out actually implementing the software, that was my first two years, and then another two years I worked in ongoing operations. This is another part of my company’s business: a lot of companies don’t want to run their own payroll or run their own benefits. So I was managing ongoing, day-to-day operations for a couple clients of ours. That really taught me a lot about the day-to-day operations of our customers.

And then, to finally answer your question what do I do now…in the past two years I’ve moved into more of a product-focused role about developing new products and specifically working in sales. So, when prospective clients in the marketplace go out and say, “Hey, we want something. Some new HR system that can do these hundred things for us. Alight, could you guys do that?” Then I’ll take it to our operations team, and I’ll take it to our product team—the technology team—and say, “Hey, could we configure our software to do this for them?” And then I spend most of my time writing proposals, talking to clients, doing demos of our services and our software, and really just listening to what our clients—usually prospective clients—say, and then figuring out what we can do for them.

How impactful do you think college was in training you for this job? Where do you think you received the training that prepared you for the job that you’re doing right now?

It’s probably more, for me, on the soft skills side of things. That’s where I think I benefitted quite a bit from a liberal arts focus and approach to my whole undergrad experience—not just academically but also some of the extracurricular stuff that I did, a lot of volunteering work that I mentioned before. My university had a health associates’ program that was focused on overall student wellbeing—physically, emotionally, mentally—so I got trained in different techniques and methodologies and stuff to coach people. In addition, there was a component of my academic research that was studying politics—and that’s a lot of understanding power dynamics, and who has influence over whom, and how money influences people, so I’ve used a lot of those techniques throughout my career and in particular in the sales world. When you think about how to get someone to buy something from you, that’s obviously a lot of influence and figuring out, okay, who’s the person that’s actually going to make the decision to buy something? So understanding politics…within an organization, as well as the kind of dynamics of who’s actually going to pay for something, who likes who, who should I talk to, who should I not talk to, those kinds of things.

A lot of what I do, and spend my time doing, is writing proposals…using that creative, critical thinking and writing skills. That’s a lot of what I did in college—writing papers, doing presentations. Again, not specific to a subject matter; it was more about being comfortable getting up in a room full of people you don’t know, presenting on a topic with authority, and that’s something I definitely learned to do in college, as well as getting creative and using critical thinking skills. For example, I would put myself in a client’s shoes, understand the business problem they’re trying to solve with buying the software they’re trying to buy, and then figure out a way to write a proposal that’s really going to resonate with them. It’s probably all those different soft skills, lot of critical thinking, lot of empathy, lot of understanding politics and power dynamics. And a little bit of the academics, too; it’s good to be well versed in economics.

Could you give me an example—how would the process be for you?

I’ve definitely learned the most from the most challenging clients, and that’s something that is probably not specific to the consulting career, but is something that, I’d say, gets recognized often in the consulting career.

That’s the big thing…always raising my hand when someone says, “Hey, we have this hard opportunity,” and not being afraid of those challenges. Not to say I always hit them out of the ballpark—I’ve certainly had plenty of failures—but that would be the big thing, for me. Running straight into the fire. And just not being afraid of trying out new things and using some of the skills I gained in college, especially critical thinking, and then having the wherewithal or emotional intelligence to know when I’m beyond my depth, or if I need someone more experienced within my company, my organization, to say…I could really use some help. Again, it’s a lot of those soft skills; it’s a lot of self-awareness.

When working on a client, do you usually work alone, or do you have a team of people that are supporting you or coordinating with you? How’s the work structure?

I’d say, broadly, consulting is going to be team based, so people in undergrad that are maybe evaluating this career—if you think back to middle school and high school and you did group projects and you really hated them, you might not want to go into consulting, because almost everything you do is going to be a group project of some kind. And that has been true for me, both of projects that I have done, and ongoing operations work that I’ve done, and in sales as well.

So, for example, in the projects world, I think it’s easy to understand—you’re going to have people that specialize in certain things, and you’re going to have someone that’s a project manager that manages a big Excel spreadsheet full of all the things that need to get done between now and when the software has to go live.

In the sales world, we have a similar kind of specialization, where…we’ll have someone out in the field that’s a sales person that’s going out and finding us the clients. We have someone like me, who’s more in the middle, working with our operations team and our project team to come up and write proposals and price things out and staff things. And then there’s a whole dedicated part of my organization that does the actual financing, figures out how we’re going to pay for our staffing and all that. And then we’ll have a separate part of my organization that specializes in negotiations and contracting. They work a lot with lawyers, and negotiate legal terms and those kinds of things, so, again, it’s very, very specialized. So, again, if you don’t like working in teams—might want to give consulting a second look before you dive into it.

What about Alight keeps you working there? What things about Alight do you appreciate the most?

A lot of goes back to my decision to choose them in the first place. When I decided I wanted to go for-profit in my last year of undergrad I evaluated a lot of different companies, a lot of different software companies like Alight. I evaluated some of the big four companies and actually made it into some of the final stage of interviews with them. And then, when I got to those finalist interviews—and that’s typically when [they] let you do a site visit with them and see the other people that are working there. See their offices, see what people are like. They usually let you talk to some of their senior leaders…

So, when I did that with Alight—and, at the time, it was Aon Hewitt—it was just a very different approach to any of the other companies. Most—I think all the other companies I interviewed with—they flew me out somewhere…and it was all super nice and fancy, and the offices were super nice, and everybody I met was very professional, courteous, but also very business focused. But when I went and interviewed with Alight, I met two of their senior leaders, both executive vice presidents, and it was just in the hallway, so there were people walking back and forth. And then these very senior people, they’re both wearing jeans, both very relaxed and casual…saying hi to everybody. And they started asking me a ton of questions like, “What do you like so far about Aon Hewitt? What has your interview experience been like?” and it was much less about, “Hey, you college kid, prove to me you’re worth being here.” It was a lot more of them explaining, or almost demonstrating, what the culture was like there. A lot more relaxed, a lot more down-to-earth, I would say, and that was a lot of what drew me into Aon Hewitt. I think it’s a lot of the reason I’m still there six years later.

My company rewards people based on their actual capabilities…every year, from a performance perspective, we get rated not just on what we accomplished but also on how we do our work, so it’s not just meeting our sales targets or whatever the goal is, but it’s also—do people actually like working with you? It’s just not a very cutthroat environment; it’s much more collaborative.

What do you think the future holds for this industry, like new technology, new business models, or new ways to approach a client? What do you think are the possible points of advancement that you can see in your field?

There’s quite a bit going on at the moment. Historically, companies did everything in-house and on paper. And then they started contracting to companies like mine, and then my company did it on paper for them. And then we started doing these hosted applications, so—I am going to date myself—think of an instant messenger application or downloading Microsoft Word on your computer and having it there. That’s what we would do: host the software, the client would get the benefits of it, but we did all the back-end IT stuff—like Microsoft does for Microsoft Word.

The phase we’re in right now is more of a Google Docs phase. If you think about the stuff we do today, everything is online. It’s all hosted in the “cloud.” My company accesses software online, and we host software online, and the clients access it through the internet as well, and that’s where we are now. The fundamentals of the software haven’t changed as much so far, but what I’m seeing probably the most of—I mean, obviously there’s been some changes to things like user experience. People want it to look and feel more like what they see on the internet today. They want it to look and feel more like their iPhone…they just want it to look and feel more modern.

But the main thing, right now, we’re looking at is robotics…A lot of that back-end processing that needs to be done—there needs to be human beings that are either entering data into a system, or running data through a system, and looking at issues that the system pops out, and then figuring out what to do with those issues. My company just developed a new robot—which feels weird to say—but it is just a kind of software, essentially, that we layer on top of our current software, that’ll run all the checks we would normally run for our client to make sure that their employees’ paychecks are accurately processed, but it does twice as much of the data checking that normally a human would do, and it does it in about a third of the amount of time that would require by a human being. That’s what most companies are shifting to now, and it’s not just my company or industry.

What do you think are the biggest issues facing your industry right now?

I’d say automation’s definitely a risk. If I think about—it’s obviously a concern, macroeconomically, for a lot of people about their jobs. If you think about people working in the auto industry, there’s a concern of a robot’s going to be taking over those car manufacturing jobs that were typically well-paying jobs for people. The same thing is happening in my industry…people are concerned that good-paying, white-collar jobs that people had in finance, accounting, HR, in benefits—those might go away.

I’d say probably the biggest issue facing my industry right now would be data security and data protection. It impacts my industry, in particular, because when you think about things like HR and benefits and payroll, there’s data in there like people’s Social Security numbers and their banking information or stuff about their children, and their health and their spouses’ health—all that stuff that’s very risky, that if it gets leaked, which we’ve seen some pretty high-profile leaks recently, there’s just a lot of risk associated with that and a lot of liability for a company associated with that. So a lot of what software companies, including my own, are looking at is how do we better protect that—both how do you protect the servers, the actual hardware, from getting hacked, how do you protect people from tunneling through the firewalls that we have to protect those servers, and then, obviously, how do we protect against basic data breaches.

And you’re seeing movements in places like Europe—and now California and New York are following—as it relates to what companies have to do with people’s data. There was the whole GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] thing, and that’s what’s being copied in the US now. So there’s a lot of things that companies are now having to do from a software perspective to demonstrate to a potential employee like—here’s all the data we have on you. Certain things that you have to be able to opt in to…to be able to opt out…If you don’t have a particular business reason to hold onto someone’s data, then you have to show a certificate to say you’ve actually expunged that data from your system.

And aside from the significance of teamwork in your field, what are things you think a student trying to or thinking about joining consulting as a career should consider? What advice do you have for them?

I’d say from a work perspective, if you think about the work experience you’re going to get, it is extremely valuable, for whatever you want to do, to have some kind of consulting experience. It helps build on a lot of the soft skills that you maybe learned, or maybe you didn’t learn, in college—presentation skills, analytical thinking, knowing how to manipulate data in Excel or other tools like that, visualization, building charts and graphs, et cetera.

The one thing I guess I would caution people on—and it’s something that I was fortunate enough that I could see some examples and I had some mentors in college that told me to look out for this—is if you think about management consulting in particular, like your big four basic business consulting, the lifestyle can be very appealing when you’re 21, 22 years old and just out of college. You can rack up a lot of really cool hotel points, go to a lot of cool places. Same thing with airline miles. But the lifestyle of being on the road from Monday—or sometimes Sunday night—until Thursday night or Friday morning…if you think about it, you really only have 48 hours at home… that’s something I would probably ask people to visualize ahead of time for themselves—what do they want their lifestyle to be. That was a big consideration for me when I chose the company I did. I asked, “Hey, what is the percentage of time you anticipate me being on the road as an employee of yours?” My company said 25 percent or less. And, for me, that was great. That means maybe one week out of the month that you’re on the road. And the rest of the time you get to be home, building your business, building your personal life, and those kinds of things.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.