What is a Transportation Consultant?
A transport consultant can be referred to consultants in multiple fields, which also includes the ones who provide suggestions and advice regarding transportation systems, like school bus systems or city bus networks. It can also be referred to logistics specialists that provide recommendations and suggestions to transportation clients along with delivery drivers.
Notably, while being focused on multiple transportation networks, a transportation consultant has to perform extensive research to assess the current capacity of any transportation network. In addition to that, a transport consultant also has to collect and analyze data and come up with quick transport solutions on how the transportation system can be improved.
Building out new features, like improved light rail lines or bus routes is also one of the responsibilities of a transport consultant. Further, some transport consultants also teach at universities or colleges.
How to Become a Transportation Consultant
If you want to become a transportation consultant, you will be required to have a significant amount of experience in the field of transportation planning. Along with that, you will also be required to have principal educational qualifications before you can start working as a rail or road transport consultant.
Notably, many transport consultants possess a bachelor’s degree that allows them to concentrate on some good areas like civil engineering, environmental design, geography, public policy, and economics. Apart from a bachelor’s degree, you will also be required to have several years long experience of working as a transport planner for a private company or government agency.
This part is important as having hands-on experience working in the transportation industry will enable you to know how this industry actually works. To become an efficient transportation consultant, you will have to develop strong verbal and written communication skills, along with analytical thinking skills.
Responsibilities of a Transportation Consultant
Here are some of the responsibilities that every transport consultant has to take on:
- Provide SharePoint administration and development, financial and budgeting reporting, develop user guides and training manuals, and manager invoicing.
- Negotiate service and pricing on the behalf of the customer in moving TL and LTL via Truck, rail, ocean, and air.
- Offer support for new business development and facilitate logistics planning and strategic transportation to ensure safe transport.
- Streamline GIS on MRE reports to provide daily updates and create MRE tracking reports.
- Use AutoCAD for frequently updating drawings and creating designs for parking for layout. This can be required for both residential and commercial developments.
- Assess current truckload data to evaluate lane density by destination or origin.
- Maintain good communication with the staff of the logistics team to take the program further and increase the chances of getting more profitable outcomes from the freight management program.
- Document and define an advanced architecture that will load client databases with appropriately format data by using different in-house developed Java ETL applications.
- Drive and facilitate inaugural cloud strategy development in the public sector all across the side business units in the company.
Although not many people are familiar with this job role, a transport consultant holds great significance in the capacity of the transportation networks.
