Roy Forsstrom

A career as a consultant brings opportunities often unavailable in a regular 8 to 5 job. You can enjoy traveling to new cities and towns, working on new projects, meeting new people, and learning new technologies. Yet challenges are not uncommon. Grumpy client staff, poor facilities, failing projects, weekend work and long days on the road are a given. There are a wide variety of consulting positions and companies available right here in the Twin Cities. Or maybe you want to start your own consulting firm. In this presentation we’ll briefly survey the types of consulting companies and available jobs. We’ll briefly cover sales, marketing, proposal writing, contracts, insurance, presentations, winning work, project management, staffing, travel, taxes, international clients, and professional licenses. And we’ll touch on the questions: Is it better to work on your own, a small shop or giant corporation? How do you get hired? How do promotions work? Is this right for me?

Biography:

Roy is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society with over 20 years of consulting experience in the utility sector. 

After a stint as a nuclear reactor operator in the US Navy, Roy finished college and taught embedded systems at a technical college and later cultural geography at St Olaf College. He was the Geographic Information Systems Manager for the City of St Paul and Dakota Electric Association. Roy then shifted to a 20 year consulting career where he was employed as a Consultant/Senior Project Manager with consulting firms ranging in size from 10 to over 725,000 employees. Clients included electric and gas utilities in the US, Canada, Southeast Asia and Africa. He retired as a Senior Principal from Accenture in 2019. He currently volunteers with the FAA Aviation Safety Team and as a Red Cross instructor.

Roy has an MA in Economic Geography from Columbia University in New York. Never one to stop learning or contributing, in September he will begin PhD studies in Natural Resource Science and Management at the University of Minnesota. 

Email:

Address:Pepin, WI, United States