So I'm currently working as a consultant with an agency that's fairly hard to get into, everyone loves working there and few if any people ever leave. The benefits and pay are exceptional and I'm thrilled to be working there.
What I'm concerned with is my first project that I'm assigned to. As a consultant, I think that I should be able to provide some kind of immediate value, which at the very least means that I should be well acquainted with the technology that they're using. I'm about two years out of school at this point and while I've worked with Java and Spring Boot before , it was for only the first six months or so of being an industry professional. For the last year and half I've been off doing platform/devops stuff so my main tech is Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, IBM MQ, SQL, NoSQL, etc.
I'm fine with having to entirely relearn java and spring boot, I have nothing personal or professional against them besides them not being the most exciting or interesting technology out there. What I am concerned about is that it's going to take me a bunch of time to do so, and during that time I'm providing very little to no value to my client. I'm very confused about the expectations in this role, and I've only gotten more confused after chatting with my boss at my consulting company. The role also seems to be fairly short term, somewhere in the six-twelve month range. So for anywhere from half to one quarter of the time, I'm not providing value.
So my question is basically how can I temper some expectations? I'm not sure how the account manager for the consulting firm sold me as a consultant, but if he pitched me as some sort of java and spring boot expert, he's wholly mistaken and I certainly didn't do so during the interview process. Granted, the period in which I began interviewing to when I received an offer was less than two weeks, but I didn't start my consulting gig for a whole month. There was no conversation during that time about what role I was going to, available projects, expectations, etc.
I'm not really sure what to do, I like the company and I want to stick around and do well, but it's so easy to doubt yourself if expectations are ambiguous or unreasonable. Thoughts?