What Computer skills do you need in MBB to succeed as a consultant? List some tools or programming languages.

Hello!

Although some people get to see some Tableau and R, 99% of people deal only with Excel. 

Indeed, iff there is one thing I wish I had done before joining McKinsey, that would have been Excel. It can really be a game changer, so I would really focus on that (more than pptx, industry knowledge, etc., that are nice-to-have, but not deal breakers).

Excel skills are part of the core skill-set of consultants, and it´s great that you want to practice them. PFB a list of the most popular commands:

• Basic operations: SUM, SUMPRODUCT
• Text transformations: CONCATENATE, LEFT, RIGHT, & operator,
• Connecting different datasets: VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX(MATCH(),MATCH())
• Conditional-based operations: SUMIF, COUNTIF, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, COUNTA
• Learn how to analyze data using Pivot Tables

There are plenty of online materials:

• Microsoft Support: https://support.office.com/en-us/excel
• Kubicle: https://kubicle.com/personal (go for the 7 days free trial - Excel for Business Analytics)

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

Hi there,

Mostly Excel and PowerPoint. Mastering Excel is particularly important to increase productivity and speed. Knowing how to work with macros is a nice-to-have but not strictly required skill.

Best,
Francesco

It depends on the role. But, the most important tools you will need are Excel and PowerPoint.

GB

In order of descending importance:

MS Powerpoint
MS Excel
(Internal expense system)
Alteryx
Tableau (nice-to-have)

Hi,

I believe  in management consulting, the all weather handy tools are MS Excel, MS Powerpoint and MS Word ( rarely used now). But global institutions or Govt agencies mostly want the output/report in MS Word. 

If you are doing lot of PMO roles, good to know MS Project. If you are working in capital projects, need to know Primavera. 

If you are doing lot of process related work, knowing ARIS, Visio helps.

If there is a need to learn anything beyond this depending on the project, believe you will get the requisite training from the firm itself. 

Thanks

Hi there,

At MBB, you will be able to learn them on the job (ample training, mentoring etc.). That being said, the tools you need you learn, in order of importance are:

1. PowerPoint
2. Excel
3. Alteryx
4. Tableau
5. Nothing else

You won't be able to get away with not knowing PowerPoint/Excel. You may never have a project that requires Alteryx/Tableau. You will never, ever, need to learn a programming language.

It's mainly four tools that you'll need:

• Powerpoint
• Excel
• Tableau
• Alteryx

I don't think it makes a ton of sense to practice powerpoint, as all firms have their internal plugins that provide additional and simplified functionality to the regular version. Practicing without that doesn't make a lot of sense.

For all the others you'll find tons of materials out there to preparte. 

Hi there,

I would advise you to master Analytical tools (Alteryx, Tableau, Qlickview, etc.). Excel would help you meet the basic expectations for Analysts, while Tableau/Alteryx would definitely make you standout!

All the best, 

Mehdi