Hi,
I've recently started learning to use VBA on Excel, I reckon that it adds a little + to my CV as it can be a very useful skill to know when analysing vast amounts of data on Excel.
However, I was wondering if there were any other coding languages commonly used or that would be advantageous for a consultant?
Cheers.
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If you want to stay in consulting, unless you're doing complex statistical analysis, VBA is really all you need. If you want to go into further depth with stats, learn R/Stata/SPSS/SASS - any of these will suffice, though some have expensive licensing fees. You may also want to look into Tableau and Hadoop - both are widely used in the BI/big data community.
If you want to do more programming-centric work, like building custom platforms and interfaces, you'd be better off learning Python, Ruby, PHP or C/C++.
I'd agree with this, VBA is likely all you'll need. Hadoop is great as well, but on a much larger scale.
VBA is also much, much easier to learn than any of the others.
In all the projects I did, there was almost always someone using SPSS or coding on VBA. Access is useful too.
Yes, Access is a good tool to know (or MySQL if you prefer the CLI); forgot to mention SQL but you'd inevitably encounter that (or Postgres/Mongo) if you start learning about Hadoop or one of the programming languages.
Thanks for the answers, I've used SQL and Access a bit at school so I'll have a look at those again. For now I'll go with VBA, SQL and Access. I think that would be a decent trio to know before starting and afterwards see what else becomes of use.
Whilst on the topic; are those coding skills highly valued, a small advantage or non-influential? Also, any particular area of consulting they are more useful in? IT, strategy, financial, etc.
Tableau is starting to become more popular in the consulting community because it produces far better data visualizations. From what I've heard at my firm, clients are huge Tableau fans.
Programming at MBB (Originally Posted: 07/18/2011)
Hi,
I have an opportunity to do some programming/computing courses at university. Does anyone know if learning any of Matlab, IDL, Python or R and/or learning how to use Illustrator would be of any use working at MBB?
Thanks.
It would be of no use whatsoever.
Ok, thanks. Thought I'd check before passing up the opportunity since they'd be free.
I'm not so sure they would be useless, but I agree that they will not be something that will make it or break it for you. In my opinion, R would be a useful tool to know for market analytics - everything depends on the type of projects you will be working on
Besides, Matlab would be of use if you were to work on some advanced stuff if you were to work for the corporate finance or financial institutions practices - Matlab an Mathematica are used by S&T desks across the IB industry, as well as to price complex (structured) products.
As a consultant, those skills are useless. I would imagine they have proprietary software and fairly strong research departments. So, it may help there.
useless. spss maybe, or the monitor group version of that i think called marketsphere other than that useless
You would look impressive with all these skills on your resume, which would help you land an interview, which is the first step in getting a job at MBB. The skills themselves aren't relevant to the job, but they're good to have.
One of my managers once commented that my excel file structuring (use of lots of variables and references) makes it seem like I did programming before.
Thanks for all the comments.
Persimmon, I already have an offer from MBB in Europe to start early 2012 so I was more interested in whether the programming would be any use once I started rather than how they'd appear in an application. The general consensus seems to be that they wouldn't be much use on the job so don't think I'll bother.
Thanks.
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