McKinsey preparation plan

Question

Hi all! :)

I'm a 23 year old student from Central Eastern Europe and in few days I'll start preparing intensively for McKinsey interview and plan to apply for Business analyst intern role in approximately 3 months.

Right now, I'm working on crafting my plan and would like to get feedback/thoughts from people that have been through this. Here is the basic outline of my plan - note that I currently plenty of free time.

(a) Mon: Case interview + skill building (total number of hours: 3-4)

(b) Tue: Reviewing my case interview from yesterday + skill building (total number of hours: 3-4)

Wed(a), Thu (b), Fri(a), next Mon (b)...and so on.

In the course of 2 weeks (10 working days) I plan to go through 10 cases and improving skills in the same time. Total amount of solved cases in 3 months will be approximately 60-70.

First, I'll buy McKinsey Case Interview Training Programme from Igotanoffer (could anyone tell me if they would recommend them?) to get some basic knowledge. After I learn basics and go through couple of case interviews by myself, I plan to focus mostly on 1 on 1 interviews with other candidates here and listen to LOMS after every 10-15 interviews. I also plan to have a journal to keep track of my progress. Besides that, I'll spend rest of the time building skills such as effective communication, data analysis, mental math, etc.

The thing I am worried about most is business intuition / creativity. Any advice on developing it?

Thank you for reading my post. I am happy to hear whatever feedback anyone has on my plan.

Answer 1

Hi,

Business Acumen is actually about building proper industry and functional knowledge.

Focus on the most common industries in the following priority (sorted by probability of geting a case): 1-retail and CPG; 2-airlines; 3-Telecom; 4-banking; 5-natural resources; 6-tech

There are several sources of information that will help you develop the business sense:

1) Cases - you simply solve 50-70 cases and get a broad knowledge of different industries, common pitfalls and questions. The key here - find good partners who already had case interviews with MBB companies

2) Company annual reports for investors, equity reports, IB roadshow docs - usually have a good overview of company and industries. I consider it as the best source of industry knowledge

3) HBS cases - quite useful, but not sure if lot's of them available publically. Probably worth buying

4) Industry Books - one good book about airlines with numbers and industry analysis can give you all needed industry knowledge

5) News, Industry blogs

For each industry, you should understand:

Revenue streams
Cost structure
Margins
Key performance indicators
Key revenue drivers
Industry trends

Then I will switch to getting functional knowledge:

Marketing (Brand and trade marketing tools, etc)
Supply chain (Ops metrics like cycle time and throughput time, distribution and delivery specifics, etc)
Operations (Process optimization basics)
Finance (Very basic Finance and Valuation)

Good Luck

Answer 2

Hello,

This sounds like a great plan to prepare you for the case interview. However, please don't neglect the other factors: (1) Networking is incredibly relevant - imaging spending all this time preparing and then not getting an interview! (2) You will have to pass a written test, the PST, before even getting an in-person interview. Most estimates I've seen indicate that more than half of the applicants fail at this stage. (3) Personal fit - I've been told by someone working at McKinsey that this portion is as important as your case interview performance, and you should treat it accordingly.

Good luck!