I recently finished my PhD in aritificail intelligence, data mining area. Before that, i worked in different companiese as sofware engineer, IT support, webmaster etc. As i would like find a job in industry, I am quite interested in consulting work, however, i do not have consult experience. On the other hand, i am too old to compete with young graduate about pure programming job. Business Analyst job seems related to my research background, however, i am not familar with SAP etc.where should i go? despearate need some advice! Many thanks

may sound crazy but financial services companies are looking for analytics services, i ahev just had interviews with 2 major consulting firms who are struggling to staff people in these areas. you could also look to join companies such as SAS, informtaca etc in their R&D around data mining and analytics.

Thanks for the help, ANON. I thought financial services companies must be chaos now, many quant lost their job, why will they hire some new ppl? what kind of consulting firms are interested in analytical ? To be honest, i filled some application form in some websites of consulting firms, but no response at all :-( If i response ad from jobsite, they normally need some industry experience about it. How can i step in then?

aaah there is a huge difference in what quants do and what i was suggestinig. quants tend to do finnacial modelling etc where as what i was suggesting was what sits really in the business intelligence suject area. FS companies are all scrambling to make more sense of their data, in effect what this while fiasco has proven is that their fraud/risk/forensic systems are not really upto scratch. before anyone kicks off about why i put fraud in there, they are basically the same systems and principles behind risk detection and fraud detection. the hard part with consulting firms is that for anything other than graduate/entry level they always want to see consulting skills. also remember to use your pre PhD experience. for most of the work available its nto that they need you to have experience with implementing/design AI or data mining models in industry. they are after skills such as team work, requirements, business case and so on, which you effectively would have had some exposure to in your previous role.