All questions tagged consulting industry - Consulting Q&A - PrepLounge.com

Hi,

While it's hard to say the exact impact, I am sorry to say that everything happening now, not just the ban on foreign workers, is currently and will continue to impact recruiting.

To be clear, there are and always will be jobs. You may just have to fight harder for your place.

Also remember two things: 1) The Supreme Court and 2) Elections

Bain, BCG and McKinsey all have initiatives to ensure the wellbeing and satisfaction of their teams. One of the dimensions that is closely monitored is hours.

Number of working hours is not the only dimension and not the most important one because it is not the one with the highest correlation with work satisfaction among consultants at those firms (the ones that have the highest correlation are: how fullfilling is the module/project, how much manager/client values work that has been done).

That said, in US I feel Bain is the one with the reputation of having, on average, better working hours among the top three. Keep in mind that within each firm there is a lot of variability of how many hours you work based on:

-office you work with (some offices have longer hours than others)

-client you work for (some clients work their consultants more because they know what they can get)

-team you work with

-type of project you work on

On average expect to work 55-60 hours a week. A relaxed project can be even 45. An intense project goes into the 75-80 with peaks of 100 hours in key weeks.

Hope it helps,

Andrea

Hi Anonymous,

Let me share a slightly more negatively painted picture of the consulting industry - but it's the real one in my opinion.

Looking back, consulting industry and the top players definitely lost their glamour and exclusivity. Please bear with my if I simplify a bit, but it's more to give you the general picture than being overly precise in details.

Historically, most of tier-1 consulting firms had a strong focus on strategy, since it is/was considered as the supreme discipline in the field. However, most clients were not able to consistently implement the strategic advice, and after a few niche players also the tier-1 firms started to move more towards implementation support as a follow-up of their strategy projects.

Given the more detailed scope of projects, also many boutique consulting firms made their inroad into the large corporate segment, and together with a more competitive 'tender' approach many of those smaller, more focused boutique consulting firms could steal nice projects from MBB.

Apart from a few big scandals (thinking of McKinsey insider trading and the like) the industry survived rather well until now, luckily.

However, the consulting industry lost a lot of it's attractiveness for candidates. Google, Amazon and the like siphon away top candidates, and we need to see how that developes over the next decade. If candidats have highly valued skills (especially in digitalisation/transformation) they don't necessarily want to work extremely long hours and they don't necessarily want to have formal structures they need to report to (but rather prefer to work when and where they want). Just looking at business class seats nowadays, more often than not I see quite young and informally dressed people sitting close - and when having a short chat with them it usually turns out they are digital professionals (whereas some 'elite' management consultants are in economy). So definitely the war for talent is ongoing.

Having said that ... is the consulting industry still attractive for some candidates and is it one of the best learning opportunities to jump-start your career? Yes, most definitely.

Will there be a need for consulting firms in future and will they surive? Yes, most definitely.

Are getting times tougher nowadays? Yes, most definitely as well.

Hope that gives you a slightly more balanced view of the industry - if so, please give it a thumbs-up with the green upvote button below!

Robert

Hi Anonymous,

Big 4 and MBB have a different focus in terms of projects. Specifically, Big 4 work more on implementation projects rather than strategy. However, many of the Big 4 have now also a strategy branch, thanks to the acquisition of Booz (PwC), Monitor (Deloitte) and Parthenon (EY), thus moving towards strategy and more direct competition with Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies. When they overlap, competition is mainly price based – MBB are far more expensive than Big 4 for a client.

In general, compared to Big 4, in MBB you get:

• Higher competition
• Stronger alumni network
• Higher pay (may depend by the country)
• Longer hours (may depend by the country)
• Shorter project, more strategy focus
• Support for extra stuff – there are specific MBB department for research and you can outsource most boring activity (eg slides realignment)
• On average, higher budget for travel
• More exposure to CXO level

Best,

Francesco

I do agree with Sara’s sentiment on focusing on culture/people and the business focus alignment to your area of interest, but I am not sure how I feel about the segmentation. I do agree there is not a hard line, but below is a different approach to how the industry might be segmented (read how folks describe the industry or folks in industry might perceive themselves):

Strategy Consulting Firms: Main focus is to provide high level strategic advice to companies leadership (C-level and Board). They partake in other things, not limited to, but including implementation, operation etc. These companies would include:

Tier 1- which typical refers to MBB

Big 4 - Which refers to the Strategy side of Deloitte (Monitor), KPMG, PWC (Strategy&), EY (Parthenon)

Tier 2- Typical Non Tier 1 or Big 4, could be called "Other Boutiques"- example could be Oliver Wyman, A.T.K, Accenture strategy, Z.S Associate and a host of others.

Management Consulting Firms: Now this includes everything including strategy consulting, IT, Supply Chain, Operations, Finance, Deals or M&A etc. again the companies above mostly offer such services, but the industry has its way of branding MBB as Strategy, Accenture as IT, A.T.K as operation and Big 4 as financial services based. The irony is that they are all management consulting firms that do a bit of everything, so do more than the others do, but you can do strategy work or IT implementation work at most of those firms.

That being said, it is true that MBB gets a lot of strategy projects, but so does Monitor, Strategy& and Accenture Strategy, just like its true Accenture gets a ton of IT projects, but so does MBB and Deloitte. I don’t have exact data to tell you who have what share, but point is you can end up doing what you want at any firm, if they offer/ sell the service you have interest in.

More specific to your question on if they are the same globally, for the companies described above they operate globally, but sometimes with a slight change in focus (read what the business opportunity might be in that region – Houston firms focus on Energy, San Francisco’s would focus on Tech, Middle East- Oil and Gas and maybe Retail etc.)

Obviously there is more to this, but hopefully this is sufficient to get you a sense of the current industry position.

Hi there,

I know a bit about them as I have a few friends / acquintances that work there, and have a friend that works in industry who worked with FTI.

FTI Consulting is not really management consulting. They do economic consulting work - e.g. regression models / econometric models. My impression is that while the people there are typically very smart and definitely more quantitative than the average MBB consultant, they lack the "management" skills. For example, my friend who FTI did a project for said that their final output was great, but that they needed a lot of guidance along the way, and that they were not great at communicating / engaging with the team on their needs - these are things you would expect to be very smooth and streamlined at MBB / any reputable management consultancy.

So, drawing parallels with MBB isn't really correct here because its not a lower tier firm, its a completely different industry, and they would never compete for the same type of work.

In terms of switching, it's definitely possible, but you won't have advantage of "knowing" the work that someone from a tier 2 consultancy would have. I worked with an FTI consultant interviewing at Bain before and it was clear that after only focusing on quantitative elements and economic modelling for so many years, they clearly struggled with case interviews and thinking about more of the "soft" / management issues of cases.

Hope this helps

Hi A,


I was in your shoes back in 2011-12, when I also came from Ukraine to start i Germany, and search for consulting jobs. I started to learn German from the scratch. So I can really understand your challenges.

In fact, there is no so many firms offering English consulting in Germany, so I would strongly recommend you to focus on improving you German, also on practicing cases in German. It would be very tough n the beginning, but I also did it and I practiced 100+ cases in English and in German, and that is what help me to get all the offer, including MBB and then finally choosing Roland Berger.

If you have any questions or advice, feel free to reach out.

Best,
André

Hi Jack,

UCONN is a non-target school as Ivy League. However, it's not only aboit your school, but also your grades, achievements and past experiences.

Get a referral as a door opener.

Good luck,

andré

Hi! I can speak for McKinsey: candidates with agile experience have been really searched for in the past few years. I have myself done two “agilization” projects at the Firm and we were struggling to find experts within the Firm who had an agile experience in the industry. It was ~3 years ago, now the situation is probably better, but I believe the topic is still very hot and this will be a BIG advantage for you, not a disadvantage, so do not worry about it :)

Hi,
I would focus now on the interviews you are going to handle, working on the negative feedback by RB.

Feel free to text me for any tips on the set-up of a structured preparation plan.

Best,
Antonello

Hi there,

I do have industry overviews including revenue drivers for 25 different industries. Feel free to reach me, I can provide it to you for free.

Cheers

Serhat

Hi Anonymous,

The notion of prestige is debatable, but assuming it refers to the general perception of the brand, the only two firms with a strong consulting brand between the Big 4 are Deloitte thanks to the acquisition of Monitor (merged also as a brand name) and PwC thanks to the acquisition of Booz (not merged as a brand name), as also mentioned by Julien. Before such acquisition, Deloitte had already a consulting arm. The general perception of the two firms is therefore generally based on the following:

1. Booz was generally considered stronger than Monitor;
2. Strategy& is branded separated from PwC, while Monitor is not from Deloitte;
3. Deloitte did have a consulting arm before the acquisition, while PwC did not.

The first two elements support PwC while the latter Deloitte, so you will probably find people who will consider Strategy&/PwC superior and others that will consider Monitor/Deloitte superior as of today. This in general terms; at local level, things could be perceived differently, and in certain geographies PwC/Strategy would be considered definitely better than Monitor/Deloitte, and the other way round.

At the following link you can also find a comparison between the different firms based on some other criteria. In their review, they put Deloitte as top for consulting, but since the Strategy& brand is separated from PwC, that’s again debatable:

http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/204621/working-for-pwc-deloitte-ey-and-kpmg-whats-the-difference

Besides an analysis of prestige, I think it could also be useful for you to consider exit opportunities (in many countries, consultants stay 2-3 years, so that’s not such a remote option even if you are still considering where to go). The simplest thing to analyse that would be to take a look to LinkedIn and check which have been the exit paths for people coming from Strategy& and Monitor Deloitte in your target geography.

Hope this helps,

Francesco

(1) find more qualified applicants. BCG grew 20% last year, they are constrained by the size of the workforce

(2) depends on the office. In Dallas where I was, BCG has a nearly perfect record of people coming to BCG over Bain and McK I am certain the situation is reversed in other areas, but at the very least this suggests 1 size doesnt fit all

(3) what makes you think they won't? The faster the business changes, the more clients needs MBB

Hi Anonymous,

first of all a disclaimer: I am a white man, so I definitely have blind spots here and there and maybe see things for better than they really are. But I'll do my best to give an objective answer.

I believe that Vlad and Guennael have already made some good points. I am including below an answer to a similar question from some days ago, with some minor edits.​

Just one additional point:

I do fear that racism may be a tougher nut to crack than sexism (especially the blatant kind) . After all, women make up half of the population, so all of us have had quite a bit exposure to smart, ambitious, admirable women. So we've kinda gotten used to that.

But in many societies in W. Europe, you get A LOT less exposure to smart, ambitious, admirable people of different races. First of all because they don't make up half of the population, secondly because many of "these groups" are under-proportionally represented in higher education and the traditional circles where consultants come from. There's a million reasons for that, which I don't want to get into, but the fact remains. Also, sadly, in the current political climate in Europe, many groups are overgeneralized ("the Muslims", "the Africans") and wholesale associated with trouble. And counter-examples of well-integrated, successful people of different races are viewed as the exception to the rule, rather than vice versa. Obviously this does not happen to women, at least not to that extent.

An anecdote to that:
A good friend and former colleague has Vietnamese roots. A few years ago, he moved to the US. He said it was such a relief for him to not see the surprise on clients faces when he walked into a room that he had seen so many times in Germany. So even today, people are surprised to see an Asian-looking guy walk into a meeting. Nobody would be surprise to see a woman enter the same meeting.

So if I would have to guess who has a harder time, for example in Germany: Probably someone whose name is Ali, Mohammed, Kofi or Minh, rather than someone whose name is Theresa, Sarah or Melanie.

Hope this helps,
Elias

Here's my answer from a few days back:​

Hi Anonymous,

first of all a disclaimer: I am a [white] man, so I definitely have blind spots here and there and maybe see things for better than they really are. But I'll do my best to give an objective answer.

All your questions are justified and the observations are 100% correct.

Consulting [in Europe] is still male-dominated [and predominately white], and the more senior it gets the more so. Tons of reasons for that, many of them related to compatibility of consultant lifestyle with family.

The good news is that I believe that the industry has relatively little gender [/racial] bias or gender [/racial] discrimination, especially when it comes to recruiting. The firms in Germany that I have worked for and with or that I know well from close friends (Horváth & Partners, goetzpartners, BCG, Bain, McKinsey, SMP, EY, to name a few) are very conscious of this imbalance and actively try to work against that.

So I believe that being a woman [/non-white] definitely doesn't hurt your chances during the recruiting process. It may even help just a little bit (but really only a little bit).

During work, you'll obviously encounter the everyday sexism [and racism] both from clients and colleagues. Consulting is not a safe haven from that, although you'll mostly be working with young, highly educated and relatively progressive, open-minded individuals (as colleagues), so there are definitely worse places. I hope this sexism [/racism] doesn't manifest itself too much in your formal evaluations and feedback on your work, but it will definitely happen in everyday situations. Sorry about that!

Regarding the long-term: That is up to you. I believe the way to senior roles is wide open for women. But, consulting is a really tough job to align with family, even under the best of circumstances and even for men in more traditional family settings (man as the sole / main breadwinner). So I am aware that the sacrifices that are demanded from women to get there and the conflicts regarding expectations are infinitesimally higher for women than for men.

I can only encourage you to try to be a trailblazer because our industry needs more of them. But I am aware that it's asking a lot.

Hope this helps,

Elias

Is the question still relevant? If so, I am happy to share my views as a gp Alumnus

Hi,

Working with the application of the AI right now, I can say that AI will not replace consultants in the next 20-30 years, but rather will be one of the consultancy offerings:

1. AI is not as powerful as you think about it. You can use AI to replace the manual labor but you cannot use AI to make the complex management decisions. Even if you use all HBS cases to teach this AI - this dataset will be still not enough:) Not even saying that it is extremely hard to label good and bad management decisions in this dataset, since the person labeling them should be a business guru himself. Moreover, most of the business decisions have a tradeoff.
2. Consulting is a people business. AI can not talk to people. Clients invite the consultants not only because of their problem solving but also because the companies need someone with a consulting brand to be responsible for the management decision, they need external people who are not dealing with internal politics, people who can work across many departments. AI can't talk to people and collect their ideas, AI can't implement things, AI can't negotiate, while the consultants can.
3. The clients will need the external support to implement AI. They need someone to structure it, organize the collection of data set, labeling, etc. Here consultants can help
4. Consulting companies are actively building AI capabilities on their own. Although they are in the early beginning. Moreover, there are new rising AI consultancies and they are all trying to partner with MBBs to get access to the clients

Best!

House of lies is the only one I know about too, however "suits" (TV show) and "up in the air" (movie) while not being about managment consultants were particularly relatable in terms of experience on the job (one for type of work and environment, the other for the travel).

Have fun binge watching!

Andrea

From speaking to many Investment Bankers at recruiting events at Cambridge trying to convince people that IBD>Consulting: the reason they almost all gave is that in IBD, you actually do, whereas in consulting you just advise. Of course, I don't fully agree with this, or I would be in IBD, but to help you craft a compelling argument:

In IBD you have skin in the game, and your work will definitely have an impact in the end - imagine working on a multi-billion merger, and you worked directly and contributed to that deal.

Consulting, on the other hand (for the sake of this story), you provide a recommendation, but there is no guarantee anything will change, or that your work will have impact. Ultimately, you would rather actually have an impact than produce some reports that might or might not be implemented.

Also, one thing you should definitely not mention is better exit into Private Equity. I know someone who mentioned this as a reason for "why are you switching from consulting internship to IBD" at a final round with Morgan Stanley and got rejected, and in the feedback they said the primary reason was they didn't think he would stay for longer than 2 years before trying to jump ship!

I see them playing a bigger and bigger role (pending their ability to keep audit and advisory/consulting independent and do not run into government limitations).

In the industry there is a lot of buzz about acquisitions of these three being very close (would add Bain too), the bigger question is whether once these are acquired the talent stays and customers will still be willing to pay a premium under a big4 name. Recent, similar acquisitions didn't seem to produce the hoped results.

Andrea