Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a cost consultant and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

A cost consultant has the main role of providing estimates concerning the cost of a construction work as well as helping in controlling costs. He/she performs feasibility studies and helps to determine the requirements of the projects as well as assisting in defining the budget of the project.

Other tasks associated with the role include performing analysis and cost estimates, preparing cost estimates, take part in the preparation of cost monitoring reports and estimates, comparing the designs against the budget, performing value and risk management exercises, benchmarking the requirement of the project against similar projects, preparing cash flow projections and cost plans as wells as evaluating value for money.

Core Skills Required to be a Cost Consultant

Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.

Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.

A cost consultant should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Conflict Management:

Conflict Management is a situation where the interests, needs, values and goals of the involved parties interfere with one another in the workplace where different stakeholders have different priorities.

A Cost Consultant must learn to recognize and deal with disputes in a rational, balanced and practical way through effective communication, problem-solving abilities and outstanding negotiating skills to restore the focus of the company's peace.

Innovation:

Innovation is the process of translating new invention into a service that creates value or brings better solutions that meet the requirements.

A Cost Consultant ought to introduce innovation in their business to help save time and money giving a competitive advantage to grow and adapt the business in today's marketplace as well as creating more efficient processes and ideas with a likelihood for your business to succeed.

Collaborating with others:

Collaborating is willingly working with one another and cooperating in whatever task one is assigned without behaving poorly or having an attitude change that hurts others.

A Cost Consultant is meant to collaborate with all workers and management both male and female without causing frustrations or sidelining any worker or delaying their promotion from any informal conversations where most decisions are often made.

Office Politics:

Office Politics is a tool that assesses the operational capacity to balance diverse views of the interested parties of the human interactions that involve power and authority.

A Cost Consultant is meant to pay attention to the organizational politics while creating the right political landscape that lubricates the organization's internal gears without focusing on personal gain rather focusing on the corporate profit that will benefit everyone.

Self Awareness:

Self Awareness is the ability to have a sound understanding of who you are as a person and how to relate to the world in which you live by understanding your strengths and weaknesses and how to manage them in the workplace.

A Cost Consultant must creatively know how to administer the workforce diversity by understanding the culture identity, biases, and stereotypes and become more aware on how he reflects his thoughts, feelings, and behavior towards the staff.

Long Range Planning:

Long Range Planning is setting long-term goals and objectives for your business or project to ensure its growth and sustainability is reached by all the employees.

A Cost Consultant needs creativity in defining long-term goals that ought to be proactive, putting together a full employee focused management strategy that analyzes the major initiatives and translates them into functional goals that employees handle.

Sales Ability:

Sales Ability is the skill to understand your product's features and being able to present their benefits accurately and persuasively to the customers.

A Cost Consultant must bring up a team that is enthusiastic and passionate about their products as well as eager and confident to share the benefits with the waiting market using conventional and creative sources of information that the company has come up with.

Business Trend Awareness:

Business Trend Awareness is the capacity to be conscious of the changing ways in which the companies are developing in the marketplace.

A Cost Consultant should have the required knowledge of new business trends that he can instigate or follow and the understanding of how they are impacting the business decisions which will eventually bring success to the employees as well as the enterprise

Entrepreneurial Thinking:

Entrepreneurial Thinking is a mindset that allows embraces critical questioning, innovation, service and continuous improvement with an attitude of change.

A Cost Consultant should challenge himself to see the big picture and creatively think outside the box too with the ability to fight all the challenges faced and keep going in the face of calamity and the social skills needed to build great teams in the workplace.

Process Improvement:

Process Improvement is the creation of new processes or improving the existing ones that will work and take your corporation to the next level.

A Cost Consultant must maintain the continuous improvements in the workplace that are favorable to the current investors, potential investors, and stock owners while working with methods that can serve as a foundation for future business decisions causing a profitable growth.

Hard Skills Required to be a Cost Consultant

Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.

Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.

A cost consultant should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

Cost Consultant: Hard skills list

Accounting
Administration and Management
Algebra
Analyze and Interpret Data and Budgets
Apply statistical process control (spc)
Apply understanding of manufacturing concepts to cost estimation
Bid engineering, construction or extraction projects
Billing Statements (Prepare billing statements)
Blueprints and Technical Drawings
Bookkeeping
Budgeting
Building and Construction
Computers and Electronics (use computers to enter, access and retrieve data)
Customer Service
Cost Analysis Theory (Apply Cost Analysis Theory)
Cost control, Budgets and Forecasts
Cost Estimation Software
Data Analysis & Benchmarking
Defining of scope
Design
Determine production factors
Develop and maintain cost estimation data bases
Economics
Engineering
Equipment factored and capacity factored estimating
Estimating
Estimate cost, time, and materials needed for repairs
Estimate damage
Estimate time needed for project
General Factors and Ratios
Instructing
Labor Productivity Analysis
Normalization (inflation, metallurgy, location, etc.)
Mathematics Principles
Management of Financial Resources
Management of Material Resources
Obtain information from clients, customers, patients or others
Operations Analysis
Order parts
Planning / scheduling
Prepare cost estimates for construction related projects
Prepare cost estimates for management information
Process records and maintain forms and files
Reading of and quantification from engineering document
Reporting (Prepare reports in timely manner)
Schematics and Specifications
Statistical Data (Analyze statistical data)
Statistical cost estimation methods
Systems Analysis
Technical
Technology
Translate design specifications to cost estimates
Usage of breakdown structures
Writing
Write project or bid proposals
Write vehicle damage repair estimates

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