摘要：

This master thesis is based on speculations about the term "Consultant" and whether we can possess a consultant job. Therefore the work focuses on answering the following research question: What is a good IT management consultant and to what extent do graduates from cand.it in IT management at Aalborg University achieves the necessary skills to possess the position? In order to be able to answer this, the work was divided into two parts. The primary part is based on the subjective paradigm where we used a hermeneutic approach including phenomenology. We did this to develop our understanding of the phenomenon IT management consultant. The research started with a literature review to gain insight into what the literature presents about the phenomenon and in order to gain a solid knowledge prior to the empirical part of the research. We conducted five unstructured interviews with experienced consultants from Deloitte Con-sulting, Accenture, KMD and two anonymous consultancies. The combination of the literature review and the five interviews developed our understanding of IT management consulting into the following ten aspects:(1) The IT management consultant work as an advisor concerning many different aspects of IT management in an organization. This could be IT strategy, change management or building business cases for new IT investments. (2) Experience makes better consultants and a high level of experience is often needed to advise the CxO level. (3) Interpersonal capabilities and (4) communication skills are the base ingredients of the consultants work because of the importance of understanding others, making presentations and to create mutual trust. It is therefore needed to fulfil the rest of the aspects. (5) Certifications are often needed to use the same terminology as the customer and to even get hired. (6) Internal knowledge sharing is essential to keep developing the consultancy and to help colleagues. (7) External knowledge sharing is important because the customer normally must continue on working with the project that the consultant was involved in. (8) Resistance for changes is inevitably going to happen in every project and the consultant therefore needs to be aware of this. It is not necessarily a negative perspective but it must be addressed. (9) The consultant must be able to generate sales, in form of after work, since that is necessary to keep the consultancy going and growing. (10) Project management skills are what keeps it all together and are a strong tool to overcome resistance.In the secondary part we chose to follow a more objective paradigm in order to gain a "snapshot" of the education cand.it in IT management development of skills at the graduates. To do that we used a questionnaire with 109 questions and received 29 responses out of 60 possible. We conducted a data analysis to deduce the snapshot which led to formulation of six recommendations for the education: #1: Introduce the students to Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Strategies through lectures and increase the focus on IT architecture, Integration Strategies and IT portfolio management through lectures and projects. #2: Establish personal evaluation from the project company's contact person at the end of the project period. #3: Focus on planning and hosting workshops and focus group interviews, through the projects. #4: Focus on how to plan and execute a course (eg. associated with an implementation of a new IS) as part of a project. Further efforts must be made to get some of the top management from a project company to attend to the final presentation after completion of a project. #5: Present the certificates belonging to specific areas. This could be done at the beginning of each new course to which the relevant certifications quickly could be presented. #6: Include project management, as part of the project in the 9th semester and thesis in the education curriculum.Overall, we believe that the education is quite skill-enhancing in the perspective of preparing graduates to become IT management consultants. Of course there is alw

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