Every assignment, profile, and search on ConsultEarth runs on the same backbone: two tags rather than one. Get them right and the right work finds you with almost no effort. Get them wrong and you spend your time wading through assignments that were never a fit. It is worth understanding how the pieces connect.
Two questions, not one
Consulting work answers two separate questions, and most job boards force you to answer only one. A domain says where the work happens: energy, water, agriculture, public finance. A function says what the consultant actually does: evaluation, safeguards, engineering design, procurement.
Those are genuinely different things, and collapsing them costs people work. A monitoring and evaluation specialist who works on energy projects is not an energy person or an evaluation person. They are both. Asked to choose one, they disappear from half the assignments they could win. So ConsultEarth asks both, and scores them separately.
The same two questions are put to clients posting an assignment. Because both sides describe the work in the same vocabulary, the platform can line them up instead of guessing. That shared map is the whole trick. The field guide walks through every domain and function and what sits inside each.
Climate and development are markers, not categories
ConsultEarth spans climate and development. They overlap constantly without being the same thing, so neither is something you pick from a list. Each is a marker applied on top of the work: a carbon accounting project in Germany is climate work without being development work, and a schools information system in Honduras is development work without being climate work.
This is how the development banks that fund most of this work classify it themselves. There is no climate sector in their books, because climate work is water work, energy work, agriculture work. Treating climate as a category competing with agriculture would force the same false choice all over again.
Matching runs on overlap, then proof
When an assignment is posted, ConsultEarth surfaces it to the experts whose domains and functions overlap with it. Each axis is scored on its own, so you can see exactly where a match came from: full marks on function and none on domain tells you something useful that a single blurred number would hide.
The more honestly your tags reflect what you actually do, the more relevant the assignments that reach you. The expert who ticks a dozen tags to look versatile does not get more good work. They get buried under assignments that were never a fit, while the matches that mattered are lost in the noise.
Overlap gets you into the room. What happens next is decided by proof. Clients see your track record up front: the work you have done, the organisations you have done it with, the projects you can point to. Credentials open the door; proof decides what happens after it. This is deliberate. Who you know should not be what gets you the work, so the platform is built to reward what you can show.
How to get better matches
- Answer both questions. A domain without a function tells a client what field you are in but not what you would do on their project.
- Pick what you can credibly deliver, not everything that interests you. A focused, honest selection is matched more often than a long one, because every match it produces is a real fit.
- Fill out your profile. Overlap surfaces you; proof gets you hired. Past projects, organisations, and certifications are what a client reads before reaching out.
- Keep it current. The work you add today shapes the assignments you see tomorrow.
None of this is a black box. Matching is a careful reading of two things described with the same words, settled by evidence. Your job is to describe your work clearly and let the proof speak. The platform handles the introduction.
The rest is the work itself. A few minutes spent sharpening your domains and functions is the highest-leverage thing you can do here. The field guide shows what each one covers.