Difference between External Consultant and Internal Consultant

Internal and External Consultant
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Institutional Affiliation
Difference between External Consultant and Internal Consultant
Organizations use consultants to improve the overall efficiency of their operations. Consultants may train employees, offer solutions, or provide recommendations or suggestions to tackle business problems. A consultant can have expertise in specific or multiple fields. Their professional advice helps boost the core competencies and empower an organization to meet its set objectives. Consultants can work alone or partner with others to execute the required tasks. They provide advice on various aspects of a business, such as HR, marketing, logistics, IT, financial, and strategic planning. An organization can choose to hire consultants from within or outside the business, which depends on the organization's level of expertise. Internal or external consultants may perform distinct roles for an organization (Czerniawska, 2016). This paper examines some of the differences that exist between the roles of external or internal consultants.
Internal consultant
Internal consultants are part of the organization and offer their advice and expertise to organization insiders. They have excellent knowledge about a company's inside operations and offer consultancy services from an internal point of view. An internal consultant needs to have an excellent interpersonal relationship with its management and employees as they are their main clients. Their support and advice align with the inner vision. They ensure a company implements the right strategies to meet their goals. A firm can use internal consultants drawn from different departments within the organization or use a single professional who works in a full-time advisory capacity (Nadler & Slywotzky, 2017). Since the internal consultant works from the inside, they are already familiar with the business's various business problems or issues.
External consultants
External consultants are hired from the outside and are independent of a company. They may include individuals involved in private practice or are part of professional consulting firms or agencies. They are not familiar with the internal working culture of an organization and so have limited inside information. External consultants have great industry knowledge since they deal with multiple organizations and not a single one like internal consultants. When management hires external consultants, they need to provide them with crucial insider information to understand the core internal business aspects (Nadler & Slywotzky, 2017). Since they are not part of the organization's workforce, external consultants are hired temporarily.
Differences between the role of External and Internal Consultants
Scope
The work of external consultants covers a wide array of roles since they are involved with many organizations. They are regularly contracted by different firms to offer expert advice on diverse business problems. This is different from internal consultants whose work is limited in scope to only a single organization. They may even perform the consulting work as part of their daily tasks within an organization. They can't work for multiple clients as they are employed by a single orga...