Hi folks,
I am putting together my PEI stories for McK interview and I am bit struggling with presenting hard challenge to overcome (e.g. "Tell me about the challenge you had to push hard to overcome"). As a consultant I have challenging work in general, but I genuinely feel challenged since I emarked on this McK preparation path. Combining time demanding consulting job (and pursuing promotion this year) with case study preparation and also ensuring my wife does not divorce me posed quite a significant challenge for me. Especially since I am of a technical background and have to catch up quite a lot on business sense, etc.
I feel like it would make nice challenge story where I could speak about motivating myself to continue through the journey and also seeking support from my peers in work and family. The preparation is also long term commitment which makes it bigger challenge than things when you have to pass through few bad days in a row.
What do you think about this? Good or bad idea?
Thanks for your insight.
Thank you for the answer, Florian. I would disagree through with " you have not achieved any positive outcome" since the main outcome that I am following here is to improve my problem solving skills and become comfortable approaching any issue that I am faced with. I definitely achieved the improvement in this area although I did not passed my interviews yet. I see their "setting the goal" dimension as well as overcoming obstacles in terms of time and obviously demotivation. Ingenuity is questionable though.
Alternatively, I can speak about the time when I managed full time engagement at client, additional project on top for another client (I decided to participate by myself) and preparing proposal for 3rd client at the same time. But this was a challenge through 1 week where the work accumulated as there was not a lot of ingenuity involved to solve this, rather switching between different tasks and keep going forward to deliver best results on all 3 fronts, which I did.
That is too abstract and can't really be measured before the outcome of the interviews (''improve my problem solving skills and become comfortable approaching any issue that I am faced with''). The first question I would ask is: ''how do you know you achieved your goal?'' if we then in the same interview move to the problem solving / case interview part, this is a very risky proposition as well and will make the whole process even more stressful for you. I would look for another story!
Alright, understood. I will look for another story then. Thank you very much for providing feedback, Florian
You are very welcome! :-)