Hi Patricia,
The natural way to move to consulting given your background would be an MBA. However I saw you are 41, which doesn’t make this path very likely for top MBAs.
I would probably target consulting companies with focus on the sectors you worked on.
You will have to work on two main parts to land an offer in consulting.
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STEP 1: GET THE INVITATION
There are three main things you need to be invited for interviews:
- A great CV
- A great Cover (not always required)
- A referral – the more senior the person the better
A) CV
The key elements they will look for and that you have to optimize are:
- University brand
- Major
- GPA
- Work experience
- Experience abroad
- Extracurriculars and volunteer experience
For experienced hires like you, the university part becomes less relevant while the work experience is key.
Red flags include:
- Low GPA
- Lack of any kind of work experience
- Bad formatting / typos
- 3-4 pages length
- Lack of clear action --> results structure for the bullets of the experiences
- Long paragraphs (3-4 lines) for the bullets of the experiences with irrelevant details
- Long time gaps without any explanation
B) COVER
You can structure a cover in 4 parts:
- Introduction, mentioning the position you are interested in and a specific element you find attractive for that company
- Why you are qualified for the job, where you can report 3 skills/stories from your CV, ideally related to leadership, impact, drive and teamwork
- Why you are interested in that particular firm, with additional 1-2 specific reasons
- Final remarks, mentioning again your interest and contacts
In part 2 you can write about experiences that show skills useful in consulting such as drive, problem-solving, leadership, teamwork and convincing others.
It is important that in part 3 you make your cover specific to a particular firm – the rule of thumb is, can you send the exact same cover to another consulting company if you change the name? If that’s the case, your cover is too generic.
C) REFERRAL
To find a referral, you should follow three steps:
- Identify the people that can help you
- Write to them a customized email
- Have a call and indirectly ask for a referral
You can find more information on the steps here:
https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/hey-everyonehope-all-is-well-3176
If you need help with getting an invitation please PM me, I do a session where we can optimize everything you need for an invitation (referrals included).
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STEP 2: GET THE OFFER
I usually recommend the following to prepare:
- Define a calendar for your preparation. Identify how many hours you have before the interview and allocate a time slot for preparation in your calendar for each day, working on the points below. Many candidates need 100+ hours to be ready before the interview so you can keep that as a benchmark
- Read Case In Point or Case Interview Secrets for a general understanding of what a consulting interview is. Don’t focus on the structures proposed in the books, as they are not good enough nowadays
- Start reading good MBA Consulting Handbooks – you can find several for free online (Insead is a good one to start). Read the cases and try to apply your structure to solve them. Whenever you see there is something missing, upgrade your structure with the new insight. Try to read at least a new case per day – in this way you will absorb better the information with constant learning
- After the first 5-10 cases in books/handbooks and basic theory, start to practice live. PrepLounge can be helpful to connect with other candidates for that. There is a relevant part of the interview score that is based on your communication, which you cannot practice at all if you read cases only. Keep track of your mistakes and see if you repeat them. If so, try to identify the source of the mistake (feedback from experienced partners would be particularly useful for this). Be sure to focus on both the fit and the case part. The case part should also cover market sizing, math and graph analysis
- Before the interviews, be sure to prepare your questions for the interviewer – a great way to show you prepared in advance and to connect with the interviewer for a good final impression
If you want to spend few hours only instead of 100+ and cover everything mentioned above, I developed a program precisely for that. You can click on the link below to learn more:
https://www.preplounge.com/en/case-coach/profile/2433#coaching-package
After this program, you will know exactly what to expect in the interview, what to work on, and how to focus on the real differentiator to land a top consulting offer.
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Please feel free to PM me if you need more information.
Best,
Francesco
Thanks Francesco for the breakdown!