Top Consulting Trends for 2016

2015 will cap off another solid growth year for the Consulting Industry. Specifically, we expect the Management Consulting market to grow to over $175 billion in the United States alone and over $350 billion globally.

What are the hottest areas within consulting that we expect to continue garnering attention in 2016? As has been the case for the last several years, Healthcare continues to lead the pack as the most attractive consulting vertical. We believe that within the Healthcare segment, Life Sciences will also continue to garner momentum and will become one of the more coveted domains for larger consultancies to target from an M&A perspective. In addition to Healthcare, we see the Energy vertical regaining its footing now that the market is acclimating to the new pricing reality.

The areas where we see continued business momentum as well as increased M&A appetite fall into the following horizontal categories: Cloud Services (Implementation and Managed Services for a number of key Cloud Software products), Compliance Related Consulting (primarily in the Financial Services and Healthcare Verticals, but applicable across the spectrum, and Big Data/Data Analytics Consulting. These areas continue to show double digit growth rates and that has caused many of the larger, more diversified consulting firms to seek to enhance their capabilities and teams in these markets.

Finally, we expect to see a new trend gain momentum in 2016 – Non-Consulting Firms will more aggressively target high-end consultancies as they seek to gain access to the “C” Suite and ensure that their products and/or services do not become commoditized. Across the spectrum, we continue to believe that 2016 will be another robust year for consulting growth. The challenges in the New Year will continue to be the battle for talent and the repositioning of the larger firms to capture the newer trends gaining ground in the consulting market.