Salaries: consultancy vs. end client

Building a career plan is no small thing. You have a lot of questions about your professional expectations, your priorities, your skill development, your status, your compensation…

In this article, we'll talk salary. Among our tips for raising your compensation, we mentioned how the choice of company structure plays a role. So between joining a consultancy (ESN, Entreprise du Service du Numérique) and a permanent role at an end client, which is the better choice for top pay?

# Working as a contractor for a consultancy

Working as a contractor for consultancies is very common in IT. They externalize their IT expertise, sending consultants out to companies for a temporary, requested mission. Those consultants therefore have to be operational immediately and have the right skills the moment the manager tells them about the engagement at a given client.

How is salary calculated at a consultancy?

These consultants are billed at a daily rate based on the missions they perform and the client company.

Let's not forget that consultancies are businesses, and they aim to be profitable. So how is the compensation calculated? Your salary will be set based on your degrees, your skills, and your experience. The consultancy buys skills through salaries and resells them to client companies, naturally adding its own overhead for finding and placing consultants on missions. Despite that, salaries are still 10% higher than at an end client. But are there opportunities to grow them?

Growth

Salary growth at a consultancy is very thin and rare. If the consultancy wants to stay profitable, it has to raise its prices to clients and limit your raises as much as possible. As a result, some consultancy consultants can work for a long time without earning more. And if a profile does get raised quickly, it's usually a sign that the engagement was really lacking interest.

"These are companies that have little incentive to train you, because the more you're on a mission, the more money you make them. A day spent training you is a day they lose money."

Christophe Hébert — Founder of Bluecoders

Also, watch the missions you accept, because the bar on engagements is often lower than what you'd see working for an end client. We're mostly talking about ongoing application maintenance — applying tasks rather than having real impact on the project. That makes it harder to find a permanent role at a company after you've been a consultant for a long time.

Most of the time, the missions aren't very fun either, and concern mostly tertiary-sector companies, especially financial services. The biggest consumers of consultants today are banks and insurance.

So if you want to work on a motivating, ethical project with a high-end technical challenge, you'll need to head toward a role at an end client.

# Joining an end client in a permanent role

Startup, scale-up, large enterprise: you have a choice. Tech profiles are in high demand and companies are willing to pay to bring the right person into their team.

"The best reason to join a company in a permanent role is to grow your skills."

What about the salary?

When you grow your skills, your salary grows too. When a company hires you on a permanent contract, they see it as a long-term investment. They have every interest in training you and keeping you. That said, we recommend you be wary of salaries that seem too high — they may signal the company's inability to invest in your growth.

Growth

"A great career always starts with people who grow their skills. When I work for a company, what I have to sell is skills. The more you have, the more you can charge for yourself."

At the end client, you'll get to take on bigger technical challenges. The skill bar is much higher than at a consultancy.

To reach the big roles, no mystery: growing your skills is the key.