Corp Strategy / Chief of Staff Path / Exits
Is it best to join into one of these roles after banking or would 2 years in PE provide a better entry into a Corp strategy / COS role?
What do people do after one of these roles? Have heard chief of staff stints can generally be pretty short in nature. Do you go to an operating role at a startup / portco, and how senior would you be?
Hi Analyst 1 in IB - Cov, any of these discussions helpful:
More suggestions...
I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.
Bump
(Speaking more to CoS as I have less exposure to Corp Strat roles...) There's no need to do PE if you want to get into one of these jobs, people come straight from banking, consulting, other areas of operating companies, etc. all the time. In fact doing PE might make you look too financey / transactional for certain positions.
Generally speaking you're correct to say that Chief of Staff is generally a "finishing school" for somebody who's jack-of-all-trades to get exposure around an org and find out where they might be most useful. It's almost all 25-35 year olds and rarely done for more than 2 years because eventually people figure out you can't / shouldn't be a generalist keeping all options open forever and need to pick a lane.
Quality of experience for CoS is almost entirely dependent on who you're working for and the org structure, which gives it pretty high upside but also pretty meaningful downside. On one hand, I had a friend who proved himself pretty quickly to a leader who was willing to give him real responsibility and ended up moving to a VP-level role at age 27/28 in his (pretty big) company when something opened up. On the other hand, a different friend worked for this hardass who basically treated him as a slightly-smarter admin, constantly assigned menial tasks over the weekend, and did very little to help him transition internally... life is long but that guy probably wasted 2 years of his career
What type of tasks and responsibilities fall within the Chief of Staff role? Sounds like a good option for someone to keep options open but still struggling to see what the day-to-day of the position actually entails?
As the other guy says, it just varies a lot based on who the boss is and how the CoS's dynamic is with them
There is going to be some level of being a "super admin" in that you're managing your bossman/gal's schedule, doing shit like running copies of stuff, organizing meetings, and acting as a gatekeeper of sort with them
But then you also get exposure to all the big decisions, act as a sounding board, hear how these hopefully more experienced/wise people operate and think and have a chance to take that in and learn. Help with with analyses and actual written deliverables. You get to act as the boss's "guy" and help them own various projects to various degrees. Quick way to really accelerate your leadership capabilities if you've got technical chops and analytical power to make it work
+1 to this. There are some CXO programs that hire from top MBAs that give roles like this to fresh MBA graduates (you work in a CoS role at the start I believe). A downside is that you have to be location agnostic. The pay is on par with MBB all-in first year comp (~$225-250K). Know someone who recently went this route and I think he took it over some consulting offers and got to at least one of the final rounds for MBB.
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