Sorry guys but I am slightly confused.Is what a consultant does (day to day work) for IBM, Accenture or Atos any different to what someone working in the IT department of HSBC, Tesco, orBskyB would do? Don't they undertake the same type of work?

Bigger balls

As a consultant, you are dealing with demanding and varying clients, ever-changing industries, higher performance expectations, and greater challenges/pressures. Hence, consultants often gain skills at a fast pace.However, I would caution you to generalize about all consultants at Accenture. The MCIM/Strategy groups certainly don't resemble an IT department at Tesco!

The question is what's the difference beetween internal and external consulting? The 2nd one covers several sectors and activities. It needs a client context adaptation and management change abilities. External consultants live like nomads, but in airports, hotels .......

Consultants often get called in when internal resources haven't got the skills, time or can't hack the pressure - which is why many 'external' projects feel a bit like crisis management.The other key thing to understand is that IT departments only deal with the IT; consultants are supposed to add value by getting the technology to deliver business ie organisational level results.Simplistically you could say its the difference between being the plumber and the architecture, but 1) both have a role to play 2) don't be surprised if the 'architect' has to roll his sleeves up and show the team how to make things happen.

I'd like just to point out that being an IT consultant does not mean that you have bigger.. Don't put IT consultant with strategy consultant, it's just a different job!!

Besides resources and other financial aspects there are other reasons to get external help. An external consultant will have a 'fresh' look to the situation. In real life that means the external party does not (need) to go (fistdeep) into internal politics and can communicate more or less freely with the CxO. Most likely the activities concern nothing internal employee's couldn't have done. But for sure they would be facing internal backstabbing and politics...

Following on from this I am a junior in a large consultancy firm with 3 years exp. Looking to move to another firm but came across a rather good looking 'internal' consulting role in industry. If i go 'internal' for a year or 2 ...is it still easy to move back to an 'external' consulting practise later?

No problem at all. Consultants (MC & IT) moving into the industry happens a lot, quite a bit move back into consultancy as well (for several reasons).Depending on the state of the (economic) world in 2 years it will be no problem to move back to consultancy (and then 5 years on move back into industry again?).