Seven-year-old Brian Simmons (left) didn’t know what his father did for a living, but he knew he wanted to be him. In the mornings when the elder Simmons would rise for work, he also would rise, put on pint-sized business attire and walk around the house pretending to be a person of importance, while his father, briefcase in hand, rushed off to work.

Today, the 29-year-old is still not his father, Henry Simmons, who was at the time the City of New Orleans chief financial officer. He doesn’t wear a dark suit to work, thanks to the business casual trend. Nor has he ever been whisked away to City Hall because of the threat of a natural disaster. And he has yet to start a family. But, he is a man of importance. As a senior manager at global consulting firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (formed a few months ago after Ernst & Young LLP sold its consulting business to Cap Gemini for $11 billion), he has developed complex financial systems for mega companies, headed teams consisting of as many as 50 men and women, and logged thousands of flier miles traveling from one project to the next. The bulk of his time at the firm has been spent helping the electricity deregulation industry design and implement settlements and billing systems—first in California and now in Ontario, where he lives four to five days out of the week while working on site. The other two or three, he spends at home in Los Angeles, the location of Cap Gemini’s West Coast branch.

“Over the course of five years, the electricity deregulation industry has become a hot topic because certain states are trying to deregulate electricity in order to give commercial and residential consumers the opportunity to pick and choose their electric providers,” explains the senior manager, who has been advising various utility companies, such as Ontario IMO ever since joining Ernst & Young in 1997.

He started his career there as a senior consultant, bypassing the entry-level position of staff consultant. A year-and-a-half later, he was promoted to consultant manager and just recently was named senior manager. In most consulting firms, the traditional route to senior manager, which is one rung under partner, is staff consultant, consultant manager and then senior manager. Typically, professionals can expect a three- to four-year stint in each before being promoted.

Simmons attributes his impressive rise through the ranks in part to his experience at the prestigious New York-based J.P. Morgan, where he spent an intense six months in the bank’s management and technology program after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s in computer science and engineering. There, he learned every facet of the company’s operations, attended economics and accounting classes and even toured the trading floor on Wall Street.

Determination, hard work and timing also were instrumental in Simmons’ “premature” advancement. “I had the right opportunity to lead and to show that I not only could effectively meet all the criteria for a person at my level, but exceed them,” he says.

“My first goal was to get to the manager level as soon as possible to prepare me for the next phase in my career. At that level, I acquired project management skills, was able to lead very large teams and partners grew confident in my ability to step into different roles at a higher level.”

His Path to Corporate America  

With all of his current success at Ernst & Young, one might assume Simmons cruised through college. That would be a mistake. Although not a bad student, the University of Pennsylvania graduate would be the first to admit that he didn’t get his first job based on his GPA. Choosing to pursue a degree in computer science and engineering because he felt it would make him more marketable in the workforce, he struggled throughout most of his college career. “It was tough. At times I wanted to leave the engineering school, transfer to the liberal arts college and pursue a business degree,” says Simmons, recalling the first day of his Pascal class. He had never written a computer program, let alone heard of Pascal; the guy sitting in front of him was the 1988 Pascal Champion, at least that’s what his T-shirt said.

“These were the people I was competing against,” says Simmons, who managed to make it through college with the help of tutors, study groups and friends, and then later caught the eye of corporate recruiters with four years of college internship experience. “College is not easy,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be. There are all kinds of resources out there for you. Seek that extra help because that’s the key to surviving.”

And what of surviving in the corporate world? For Simmons, strong social skills, an ability to work in a team environment and lots of ambition have been the keys to excelling in a field that, according to him, is ripe with possibilities. He says, “the way the market is going, the sky is the limit."

Stacy Ward is the managing editor of FEDA News & Views and a contributing writer.