This is something that I have given a lot of thought in recent years.

I'm in my early 30s and have a CS degree, ~11 years of experience in business intelligence and analytics, and I worked my way through consulting roles that ranged from developer, technical lead, project manager and presales. My CV also includes a startup and a senior advisory role.

I excel at presales because I have a broad technical skillset and it's easy for me to understand diferent industry problems and advise/communicate with people on any step of the corporate ladder.

However, the feeling I get is that presales only lead to more presales roles, where most of your time is spent meeting clients and producing countless presentations to get to an eventual prototype...and there's more presales to do, so your involvement on most projects (even those you sell) is marginal at best, and that makes it harder to move to other roles.

This is a problem when I apply to roles other than "consulting", because even though I have designed and planned (and sometimes delivered) technology solutions for basically any business problem that has been thrown at me, I didn't actually have a hand in delivering most of them, even though I excelled when I did.

My experience with recruiters is that most of them disregard (or don't understand) the knowledge and skills necessary to designing and planning business solutions, in detriment of actually implementing the technology, and this makes it hard for them to consider you knowledgeable on a specific domain.

The depressing thing is that, where I work (small EU country), the industry is dominated by numerous middlemen ("consulting" firms), so hiring is mostly for outsourced "developer" and "project manager" positions where you are basically "in the grind" of projects that are most often poorly planned or managed, and thus turn into a nightmare for the teams.

What baffles me is that my skills and experience seem to be of great value for Clients I've worked for in different industries, yet those same Clients prefer to recruit people with a more limited scope (both in terms of tech and business knowledge). It's either "developer" or "project manager".

I'm describing my experience applying for roles...fortunately, I get considered for positions that actually require my skills, but never through traditional recruitment processes (that just seem to get worse).