Can you tell me which are the challenges of a job in consulting vs a corporate one?

Hi there!

So my opinion is that the main challenges between consulting and corporate jobs (besides the hours) come down to familiarity versus variety:

1. Systems vs. Familiarity: In consulting, you're constantly jumping between different companies and industries, which means learning new systems quickly. It's efficient, but you don’t always have deep knowledge of the business. In a corporate role, you know the company inside out, which helps you work more smoothly, but it can feel repetitive over time.
2. Passion vs. Variety: In consulting, you may not always be passionate about the industry or project, but you get to work on a range of problems across different sectors. In a corporate job, you're typically focused on one industry, which allows you to develop deeper expertise and passion, but limits your exposure to different business models.

Each has its own trade-offs: consulting offers variety and fast learning, while corporate provides depth and specialization.

Feel free to message me with any more questions!

Martha

Hi there,

In my opinion, the key challenges are

• short deadlines. For instance, in an MBB strategy project, you are expected to generate some preliminary answers related to the client's objective at the end of week 1 - all after potentially never having dealt with this client/industry before, meeting the team for the first time, organizing your travel logistics, introducing yourself to the key clients, requesting data from client who don't even know who you are and who are hesitant to share anything with you, analyzing the data, problem-solving with the team about it, refining it, putting it on paper via ppt. The world is incredibly fast-paced and work tends to be very iterative. Once I left McKinsey, I felt like I was running against a brick wall in a different corporate setting because everything felt so slow.
• constant pressure. This is related to the first one but expectations are incredibly high. If the partner has promised a 10% revenue opportunity to the client related to your workstream, it's your responsibility to find this opportunity asap.
• the logistics. You are rarely at home as you usually travel from Monday to Thursday or even several weeks at a time if the project is further away from home. Some love it, some hate it.

There are many more and also tons of upside here but those are the key challenges for most people. 

If you want to learn more, I wrote a book called Consulting Career Secrets, where I discuss these challenges and how to deal with them to a. perform well and b. enjoy the time and make the most of it. It's on Amazon.

Cheers,

Florian

Here are some other challenges of consulting: 

1. Travel
   1. Can be heavy travel, versus most junior roles in corporate which are not travel heavy
2. Standards
   1. The bar is high in consulting, meaning that expectations on the quality of your work is high
3. Client engagement
   1. This is for me the most challenging part of consulting
   2. Many corporate jobs may not have client facing roles and even the 'internal client' kind of role is not the same type of dynamics as per consulting
4. Progression
   1. MBB firms are up-or-out, very few corporate jobs are the same (unless you are in a sales role)