Switch to Management Consulting

Question

Hi all ,

I have been working in IT consulting for the past 2 years and I work in US currently. I have an MBA and I am looking to switch to a management consulting firm. How difficult is switch going to be. In my resume do I avoid mentioning a lot about my IT part of my consulting work and focus only on the consulting part , let me know . TIA

Answer 1

Hi Anonymous,

so far that you are not joining after graduation, MBA or very few years of working experience, you would be considered an experienced hire by almost all the firms. As a consequence, your profile would be interesting mostly for the industries you worked before joining.

It could make sense thus to actually emphasize your IT knowledge, in particular for strategy related projects; as Thales mentioned, trying to hide them would mean trying to be considered as generalist, which would be pretty difficult given you have already experience and completed an MBA.

It is not clear which kind of IT projects you did - the closer to strategy, the easier the transition would be. In any case, the definitely best thing you could do to increase your chances would be to network inside the firm, ideally with alumni of your current company who joined the other firm. In this way you could both receive a referral and understand which part of your experience would be more valuable for that company.

As for how referrals work, you can find some more information at the second post I wrote at the following link:

https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/open-house-at-bcg-311

Hope this helps,

Francesco

Answer 2

Hi,

I am not a specialist in this matter. I am actually going through a similar situation, I have just started an MBA to try transition into Management Consulting.

I think switch difficulty will depend on your objective:

Do you want to join as a generalist consultant post MBA? I think this might be the toughest route as you are employed and already completed an MBA.
Experienced Hire - Specialist route. You could try to apply for specialist roles as an experienced hire. To succeed in this case I think will depend a lot on your ability to network and build some contact network within consulting companies.
Devloper/IT specific roles - There is a big push to increase IT/Digital capabilities within management consulting companies, if you can leverage your skills in an application to such a role and get hired you might later be able to transition into another role within the company.

Hope this helps. I'm sure there will be more qualified people to answer your question here.

Regards,

Thales