Being Benched

Part of the life of being a consultant is being placed on the "bench." For those that don't know, being on the bench is the term used when a person is unstaffed. Sitting on the bench for a long period of time isn't a good thing for the company or the consultant for a multiple of reasons that I'll discuss later.

I've been on the bench for about 3 weeks now since the end of my last project. While being unstaffed for a short period, around 1 week, is great after a long and difficult project because it gives you time to catch up, longer periods of bench time isn't so great.

Here's how I've been trying to pass around my time but if you have better suggestions, let me know:
1. Attending training session such as Pricing and Organization Strategy
2. Reading things such as IT Strategy and IT management
3. General reading and keeping up with the issues
4. Adjusting my investment portfolio

But in the end, there are only so many things you can do to improve yourself. Being on the bench for too long hurts your "chargability," or the percentage of time you spend working on projects that can bring revenue to the company. One way to think about chargability is to look at the car rental business.

Imagine yourself as a rental car. The company has paid X amount of dollar to acquire you. In addition, they have spent X dollars upgrading (training and equipping) you. If you aren't being rented (staffed) to some customer, then you are not providing a good ROI for the company.

However, this only paints half the problem for being on the bench for a prolonged period. For yourself, being unstaffed meanings you aren't learning new skills. Sure, I've taken the opportunity to learn new skills through training but unless you put those new skills into actual usage, then those are just theoretical skills. Thus being on the bench for too long is a double whammy.

Finally, as an employee at Accenture, too long on the bench hurts your year end performance revenue since part of our performance is measured by chargability.

With all this said, what can be done to improve this? At the moment, I haven't figured anything out yet.