First I think you need to decide what it is you REALLY want to do... be a business consultant or a technical consultant. Since you're asking about an MBA, I can only assume you already have a BS/BA of some kind, but you don't mention what it is. I wouldn't say it's compulsory... But it can't hurt. Especially if you're going on to be business consultant. If you're going to be a technical consultant, then I'm not sure an MBA would be all that beneficial. The field of "business" consulting is quite vast... there are few that are jack of all trades in that realm. Most are actually niche market players... even if some of those niches are large (like data for instance, or accounting)... Some are large, Robert Half comes to mind, some are small, one or two people.

If you want to go the technical consulting way... there are two ways of going about doing it: 1) yourself... but that means YOU are the one out there chasing down leads, making the appointments, meeting with HR to find out what's out there, in short you become your own marketer. I happen to suck at that. So when I needed to, I worked with 2) consulting firms. Through working with them, I was able to land a 36-month contract with a client, which then converted me over to full-time at the end.

Consulting has it's pros and cons... personally the cons are less than the pros, but I love the stability of my permanent position. One of the biggest cons in consulting, is if you don't have something lined up by the time your current contract ends, you could find yourself sitting on the bench with nothing to do.

"I have heard that the consultants also start their career from some technology related work as well and later in their career they shift to some consulting related work. But i cant understand how is this possible." -- It took a moment to read the hidden question here. There reason it's possible is because after you have some experience, you sometimes achieve a point where you would rather work for yourself rather than someone else... so you leave (hopefully under good terms, you never know) hang out your shingle and 1) start pimping yourself or 2) go with a consulting firm (or two)... depending on what you can do, you can be easily shopped or it can be quite difficult.

If you want to expand your skill set... then you need to pick something and learn it... outside of work if you have to. That's how I picked up .NET back in the early days. I was in a VB6 shop, I knew it was going to be a while before .NET would be adopted, but I still read up on it, I got a copy of Visual Studio (lot easier to do these days with Express Editions) and started trying tutorials... initially I had to learn C#, because there were no VB.NET examples... it was all in C#. Now I can go either way if I need to. I'm slower in C# than VB, but if I had to, I can read and write C#. Over the years I also honed my SQL skills. I don't know what they are teaching people these days, but sometimes it seems like writing SQL is something that fewer and fewer developers are able to do effectively.

If you feel like you're not getting what it is that you want out of your job, maybe it's time to consider new a new direction. Please note - I am in no way advocating quitting... but rather a re-evaluation... perhaps talking to your manager/supervisor about stabilizing the technology you work with. It could be that everyone goes through this to gain exposure to a number of different systems before settling into a more stable pattern... I got thrown a bunch of different things until it was discovered I have a knack for knowing how to deal with General Ledger information (I am not an accountant nor have I ever played one). It's just one of those things... now it seems like it's all I do... it's both good and bad.

-tg