Strategic Advisor Is One of London's Fastest Growing Roles. Here's What That Really Tells Us About How Companies Are Changing
LinkedIn's latest Jobs on the Rise data shows Strategic Advisor as the third fastest-growing role in London. It sits alongside AI Engineers and Machine Learning specialists in a market defined by uncertainty and rapid technological change.
But unlike those technical roles, Strategic Advisor isn't about building new capabilities. It's about making better decisions with the ones you already have.
The growth of this role signals something specific about how companies are changing. They're not hiring more strategists because strategy has become more complex. They're hiring them because the gap between strategic intent and commercial outcomes has become painfully visible.
Why Strategic Advisors Are Suddenly Everywhere
The LinkedIn data is precise about who's filling these roles. Median prior experience sits at seven years. The most common transitions come from CEO, Founder and Managing Director positions. The top skills cluster around M&A, strategic consulting and executive management.
This is not a junior advisory role. It is experienced operators selling judgement.
The demand makes sense in context. Companies are deploying capital faster, with less certainty about returns. Markets are fragmenting. Technology is shifting competitive dynamics quarterly rather than annually. Board cycles are too slow, internal teams are too close to the work and consultants deliver recommendations without accountability for outcomes.
Strategic Advisors fill the gap. They provide senior pattern recognition without the politics of employment. They sit above functional silos and can see connections that internal teams miss. They offer perspective without requiring headcount, equity or long-term commitment.
41% of these roles are hybrid, which tells you something about the nature of the work. This isn't operational leadership. It's episodic decision support for high-stakes moments.
Companies don't need more ideas. They need better decisions.
What Companies Are Actually Buying
When organisations hire Strategic Advisors, they're solving for specific constraints.
They need someone who can evaluate M&A opportunities without being invested in the outcome. Someone who can challenge the CEO's thinking without threatening their authority. Someone who has seen similar patterns play out elsewhere and can compress years of learning into actionable guidance.
They're buying judgement without politics. Pattern recognition without payroll. Decision support without internal bias.
Often this shows up during an acquisition, a pricing reset or a stalled growth phase where internal teams are too close to see the pattern.
Strategic Advisors work at the level of "Should we enter this market?" and "Is this the right capital structure?" and "Does our board composition match our growth ambitions?" They help organisations make better bets.
What they're not doing is executing those bets. That distinction matters more than most organisations realise.
Where Strategic Advisors Stop Short
Strategic Advisors diagnose. They identify misalignment, spot market opportunities and recommend directional shifts. Some extend into implementation planning, but most operate at the level of strategic intent rather than operational execution.
This isn't a criticism. It's definitional. The value of advisory work lies in perspective, not delivery. Advisors maintain objectivity precisely because they don't own downstream outcomes.
But this creates a structural gap that few organisations acknowledge.
Strategy gets decided. Marketing gets delegated. Commercial outcomes get hoped for.
The connection between these three layers is where most growth plans stall. A Strategic Advisor might recommend entering a new market segment, repositioning against a competitor or launching a premium product tier. These are sound strategic moves. But they only create value if someone can translate strategic intent into demand creation, pricing execution, customer acquisition and revenue growth.
That translation layer is marketing. And in most organisations, it operates separately from strategy rather than as its commercial expression.
The Execution Gap No One Owns
Marketing is where strategy meets reality.
Pricing decisions live here. Demand creation lives here. Customer acquisition economics, retention mechanics, positioning clarity and competitive differentiation all live here. If strategy determines where to compete, marketing determines whether you win.
Yet boards and founders rarely have commercial visibility into marketing decisions. They see dashboards showing impressions, engagement rates and follower growth. They approve budgets and campaign concepts. But they don't see the systems that convert strategic positioning into market demand and revenue.
This is not a capability problem. Most marketing teams can execute well. It's an accountability problem. Marketing operates as a service function supporting sales or product, not as the commercial engine that turns strategic bets into financial outcomes.
Strategy fails not because it's wrong, but because it isn't operationalised. A Strategic Advisor can recommend doubling down on enterprise clients, but if marketing still targets SMBs because "that's where the volume is," the strategy never lands. They can advocate for premium positioning, but if pricing and packaging don't reflect that, the market won't believe it.
The gap isn't between strategy and execution generally. It's specifically between strategic intent and marketing economics.
Why Marketing Economics Matter More Than Strategy Decks
Strategic Advisors operate in strategy decks, board papers and investment theses. Marketing operates in customer acquisition cost, lifetime value ratios, pricing elasticity and conversion funnels.
These are not parallel conversations. One determines what should happen. The other determines whether it can happen profitably.
Most organisations treat marketing as a creative and distribution function. They measure it by activity metrics: campaigns launched, content published, events hosted. But marketing is actually a capital allocation system. Every pound spent on acquisition, retention or brand building is an investment with expected commercial return.
The question isn't whether marketing is working. It's whether marketing is driving the commercial outcomes that strategy requires.
This is where many Strategic Advisors exit the room. Not because they lack marketing expertise, but because marketing accountability sits too far downstream from strategic decision-making. By the time a strategy reaches marketing execution, it's been translated through multiple layers: board intent, executive interpretation, functional planning and campaign briefs.
The organisations that grow consistently don't accept this separation. They connect strategic direction directly to marketing economics. They ask questions like: What acquisition cost makes this market entry profitable? What pricing architecture supports premium positioning? What retention mechanics protect the revenue we're building?
These aren't marketing questions delegated to a CMO. They're commercial questions that determine whether strategy works.
The New Advisory Stack
The rise of Strategic Advisors doesn't replace operational leadership. It creates a new layer in how organisations access senior judgement.
The problem is not too many advisors. It is too few owners of outcomes.
Strategic Advisors decide direction. They help leadership evaluate options, pressure-test assumptions and choose where to allocate resources.
Operators execute. They build teams, run processes and deliver consistent outcomes within their functional domains.
But there's a third layer that most organisations under-resource: commercial leadership that converts strategic intent into revenue.
This isn't about hiring a CMO or appointing a Chief Commercial Officer. Those roles exist but often operate tactically rather than strategically. What's missing is someone who sits at the intersection of strategy and marketing with accountability for commercial outcomes, not just marketing activity.
The organisations that grow fastest connect these layers instead of treating them separately. Their Strategic Advisors inform direction. Their commercial leadership translates that direction into market demand, pricing power and customer economics. Their operational teams execute with clarity because strategy and marketing are aligned.
When these layers disconnect, you get strategic recommendations that don't convert, marketing activity that doesn't drive growth and boards that can't see why revenue isn't following strategy.
What This Signals About the Next 5 Years
The growth of fractional and advisory roles will accelerate. Companies will continue unbundling permanent leadership into episodic expertise, particularly at strategic and commercial levels.
But the next wave won't just be about accessing judgement. It will be about accountability.
Strategic Advisors provide perspective. That's valuable. But perspective without execution accountability creates a gap that organisations can no longer afford. The companies that separate strategy from commercial outcomes will find themselves outpaced by competitors who treat them as integrated systems.
Strategy is becoming commoditised. Every sector has access to similar frameworks, data and consulting expertise. What differentiates outcomes is execution economics: the ability to turn strategic positioning into market demand, pricing power and revenue growth.
This is why the Strategic Advisor role, while growing, isn't the full solution. It addresses the need for better decisions but not the need for better conversion of those decisions into commercial results.
The gap between strategic direction and marketing execution remains the highest-leverage problem most organisations aren't solving. Strategic Advisors can identify it. Consultants can map it. But someone still has to own closing it.
The growth of Strategic Advisors isn't the story. The absence of commercial ownership beneath them is.
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