Career & Application at Roland Berger

Hello!

I don´t think anyone will be able to give you the specifics -1st of all since it´s difficult to know, and if you do, you would be sharing very sensitive information, something that is never going to happen in a forum-.

The way it´s calculated is per headcount, and the different tenures have a different price. Then, it´s a simple P X Q in terms of people and days.

Cheers,

Clara

Hi!

Couple of points:

1. Please make sure BCG understands that you are having these offers and need to decide soon. Normally they are very open to expedite the process under these circumstances!

2. If this does not work, please be open about the situation with RB/OW and ask for a couple more weeks.

3. If they refuse to give you more time to decide, then just decide and take one of the offers. Then do your BCG interviews and see what comes out of it. If you get an offer by BCG and want to accept it, then you quit with RB/OW. Please don't second guess too much. Normally the firms should understand it and you would not be forced to such a move. But if they don't, then you just take a reasonable rational personal decision! And by the way - firms also don't hesitate to rescind offers or delay starting dates if external condiditons force them to do so. This has, e.g., happended a lot when the last financial crisis unfolded.

Cheers, Sidi

Strategy consulting in the Middle East is currency presenting unique, I would even say historic, career opportunities. The industry is booming through rapid double-digit growth in consulting fees over the last 3-5 years. Some companies even manage to grow with 30%+ year-on-year. This is reflected in the highest salaries (i.e. 80-120k starting package for business analyst/junior consultant, absolutely tax free, which makes it 2x or even 3x higher nett-wise than in Europe, US or the rest of Asia) and very short promotion cycles. It became again possible to get promoted to the next level in just 12 or even 6 months instead of usual 18-24 months. Some good friends of mine have been recently promoted to partners in just 8 years which is a really great "fast track"!

On top of that, the whole region is undergoing a massive transformation into post-oil era. Governments of KSA, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain are investing billions of dollars to modernize their countries in transport, infrastructure, eduction, innovations, hosting mega events like Global Expo 2020 in Dubai or Football Championship in Qatar 2022, etc. They all need a proper advice and depend a lot on the foreign expertise which is brought in the region through the leading strategy consulting firms. Working on this kind of projects is very exciting (I did myself a couple of them) and very fulfilling, because it gives you a feeling of doing something really meaningful and creating an impact in the region

The companies like Kearney (former A. T. Kearney), Roland Berger, BCG, Strategy & (former Booz), Oliver Wymann, Bain and McKinsey have faced unpresented growth in the region and are hungry searching for the very high number of top candidates across hierchies. Here are just some facts about their latest developments just to give a small touch:

• During the past Partner Boot Camp in Barcelona Roland Berger nominated 20+ new partners and senior partners, including 3 new partners in the Middle East. This is probably for the first time in the history of the company that so many people were promoted at once. The company has added 2 new offices in Doha last year and Riyadh in 2018 - with managing director of Qatar was elected as partner just within less than one year. The company's stuff has almost doubled from ~50+ employees in 2017 to ~100 nowadays. Performance bonuses have been really generous.
• Kearney is growing historically fast with 30%+ CAGR (this is absolutely insane!) and struggles to find enough good candidates for their pipeline. Nowadays, more than 30% of firm's global revenues are coming from the Middle East region. Therefore, they are temporary transferring people from other regions to ME in order to stuff adequately their projects and compansate the shortage as well as hiring excessively.
• BCG won the biggest projects in history of consulting in 2017 - Vision 2030 for the goverment of KSA (Saudi Arabia), amounting tremendeous 300m+ USD. The impact of this project is hard to overestimate. More than 400 BCG consultants work together to entirely transform the leading country in the region. Of course, BCG is hiring intensively and transfer consultants from other regions to cope with that demand.
• And the list goes on...

On the other side, I should say that recruiting practices in the region are still not very professional. Response times are really very long - several weeks, sometimes even months. The process is not well structured due to the high number of applicants and very limited HR resources.

However, I strongly believe that due to the all described above reasons (geopardizing market growth, exciting project topics, very lucrative financial prospects and "fast track" promotion cycles) Middle East region is nowadays "the right place to be" for those of you, who are eager to build a great career in consulting. No matter whether you are a university graduate or a young professional with some years of experience.

If I were you again I would definitely recommend to explore these trully historically unique opportunities in the region!

Happy to help you get an offer.

Best,

André

Hi Anonymous,

it would be useful if you could provide the exact country, cases types/difficulty may vary in different geographies.

In terms of Germany I helped a good number of candidates and cases were related to:

• Investment decisions, M&A and PE
• Market entry
• Market sizing

I am not sure what you mean by depth of math calculations, but in terms of how to approach math in the case, this is what I would recommend:

1. Repeat the question – candidates sometimes do mistakes answering the wrong question in the math part
2. Present how you would like to proceed from a theoretical point of view (you may ask for time before presenting if you initially don't know how to approach the problem)
3. Ask for time and perform the first computations
4. Present the interviewer interim steps to keep him/her aligned – don’t just say the final number
5. Continue with the computations until you find the final answer
6. Propose next steps on the basis of the results you found

In terms of general math tips, I would recommend the following:

1. Use correctly 10^ powers in your math computation. For example 3.2B/723M can be transformed in 3200*10^6/732*10^6, which makes it easier to deal with math
2. Ask if it is fine to approximate. When you have to deal with math in market sizing, and sometimes even in business cases, you are allowed to approximate math to simplify the computation. In the previous example, for instance, you could transform the computation in 320*10^7/73*10^7, making the overall computation faster.
3. Keep good notes. One of the reasons people do mistakes with big numbers is that they don't keep their notes in order, thus forget/misreport numbers
4. Divide complex math in smaller logical steps. This is something you can use for big numbers after the application of the 10^ power mentioned above. If you have to compute (96*39)*10^6, you can divide the first element in 96*40 - 96*1 = 100*40 - 4*40 - 96*1 = 4000 – 160 – 100 + 4 = 3744*10^6
5. Use shortcuts for fractions. You can learn by art fractions and thus speed up/simplify the computation - the most useful to know are 1/6, 1/7, 1/8, 1/9.

Best,

Francesco