How to introduce yourself
career psychology
As a consultant, you have to introduce yourself a lot. It is possible that you will change your clients every couple of months - depending on the task. But even at a single client, you will need to participate in a lot of meetings. What is the first thing we do during any meeting? Yeah, after the friendly small talk, we jump to the introduction section.
And there are a lot of ways to do it. You can just announce your name or give a complete overview of your CV — a better approach, as usual, somewhere in between.
Here are the four things you need to say:
Your name (even if you met all the people in the room already!)
People feel embarrassed if they forget your name. Help them with reminders when you see them next time.
Establish credibility
You were hired for the client as a consultant, supposedly an experienced one. Give a quick and impressive statement about it, e.g., number of years of experience.
But please, do not cite your resume - it is way too long!
Explain why are you in this meeting?
Make sure everyone understands what you are doing in this meeting. What are your strengths that will help with the purpose of the session?
Finally (and optionally) - mention something interesting!
Keep it semi-professional. Or you can always fall back for a dad’s joke. It will be easier for people to associate you with this story later and build a personal connection.
Let me give you an example:
“Hi, all! My name is Mikhail, and I am a Senior Consultant from Servian. I have more than 15 years of experience in IT. I primarily focus on cloud architecture and DevOps practices but also can tell the difference between a good code and a bad one. And as Azure Solutions Architect, I always have my head in the clouds :)”