Hi,
It depends on the role you are applying to:
- Experienced hire for a generalist position
- Research expert
- Expert hire in a particular practice (e.g. implementation coach in Digital)
1. Experienced hire for a generalist position - this is basically the same as the generalist. Your expertise will help you with staffing on particular projects
2. The research expert is a supporting (non-consulting) role. Here are the implications:
- You are specialized in a particular industry sector
- You may or may not be assigned to a project. In most of the cases, you will have limited client-facing activities.
- Lower salary
- No international staffing, though lots of remote work with other offices
3. Expert hire in a particular practice - it's a more client-facing role:
- You are specialized in a particular function
- You will be assigned to a project. You'll have quite a lot of client activities
- Salary might be comparable to consultants
- International staffing opportunities
Answering your second question, you will have 3-4 case interviews with FIT and some industry-specific questions. You should know:
- Latest trends in your field
- Key analytics instruments and examples of how you applied these tool in your past
- Applicability to different industries
I think the best way to prepare is to find the relevant technical articles and knowledge nuggets on McKinsey official site - they have plenty of them.
You may also be hired for some data-science positions. In this case make sure that you know how to work with excel and databases (sql, Python, etc.)
Good luck!
