Now that I have been accepted to an MBA business schools<br /> ">M7 program, class of 2017, I realized it is time to start exploring what career options are there. From the beginning, I know I would use my MBA to do some self reflection and discover what long-term career I want to take (I have learned a lot about my self when I wrote those admission essays).
What I learn about my self is that I want to make an impact to the average person's life. However, I understand that this goal is super vague and can be anything (though it taught me that I don't want to stay in banking). So my question is whether consulting the best option for someone like me - one who doesn't necessarily have a concrete path in mind and want to stay flexible and at the same time get exposure to different industries and jobs that are out there.
My fear about consulting is that it will lead to mostly just "strategy" roles within large companies. What about marketing roles or product development roles?
Cheers.
Congrats on getting in! As a current bschool second year (T15, not M7), I can help shed some light on your question. I was in consulting before school and am exiting school to an industry role. Bottom line, consulting does give you the most flexibility a couple of years down the road in that it allows you to enter into almost any industry. You're right in that a lot of the jobs offered to ex-consultants are these "strategy" jobs, but there's a twist to that. The reason these are the types of jobs offered to ex-consultants is that the company doesn't quite trust you yet in a GM role as you haven't been in a position where you own a P&L or have line responsibility. Simply put, so far you've been giving advice, not making decisions. A lot of these strategy groups are set up so that in ~2 years you exit into a line (GM) role. While strategy groups are the most common exits for consultants, they're not the only ones available. I've seen people go into various roles (marketing, bus dev) at startups and other companies. Generally, the smaller the company you exit to the more flexibility you'll have in choosing your role.
As for marketing, this may be (in my opinion) the second-most flexible role to enter post-MBA. I'm speaking mostly about blue-chip CPG marketing here, so think of companies like P&G, Colgate, Unilever, etc. Marketing roles at these companies are what are called "brand management" roles, in that you are truly in a GM function in which you own the P&L. Depending on your product, you will spend as much or more time on pricing, distribution, and new product development as you will on advertising or promotions. People who enter these programs generally follow one of two paths after: the GM role (in marketing) up through COO and then CEO or the "marketing" role up through CMO (the paths diverge around the Director level). The exits also generally follow this path. People will either go to another CPG, go to a total general management role at companies like Amazon (or any other consumer-facing company), or go to a marketing-only (i.e. no P&L ownership and usually a staff role) job at companies as diverse as JPMorgan and Cisco. Once you make brand manager in one of these companies (2.5-3 years) you will generally be fielding many calls from headhunters looking to poach you.
Product development (by this I'm assuming you mean tech product roles) is a bit of a different animal. To be in a product dev role at a tech company, you almost without exception must have a STEM background and some coding experience. Their ideal candidates are programmers who got their MBA, i.e. someone who knows both the programming and business side of a product. Given the heavy tech bent of these roles, the exits tend to be within the tech industry and the experience isn't as broadly applicable to non-tech F500 roles.
All of the above are of course generalizations and you can find exceptions to the descriptions I gave.
When you say "any industry", do you really mean any industry that you had an assignment on during your consulting time?
I would assume a oil&gas company won't just give you a job because you worked in BCG but all your 3 years were doing financial service consulting?
Which leads me to wonder how important is your assignments during your consulting time in order to stay flexible. How much power do you have to choose your own industry during your time there?
Fantastic post, +1.
You're right in that your exit from consulting does depend to some degree on the projects you worked on, but not entirely. If you want to go to Tech, it helps to have done tech-focused projects, but I have friends from MBB who only worked on 1 tech project (or none) and are now at Google, Microsoft, etc. Remember, at the post-MBA level most roles are generalist, so it's hard to build a specific industry focus that quickly (although some people do it). Companies understand this.
As for how much power you have to choose your projects/industry focus right out of MBA, I can't really answer that for you as I haven't done post-MBA consulting. I would assume it varies based on firm, office and other things. For instance, it's going to be a lot easier to work on tech projects at Bain SF that it would be at Bain Atlanta.
Did you actually write in your essays that you want to do MBA for self-reflection and discover a suitable long-term career? If so, that goes against everything I've read and heard about what to write in admission essays. But it got you in, so good for you. If you didn't actually put that down in your essays, what did you write for your goals?
Nope, I wrote that I want to be a management consultant. So consistent with what you read before, you just have to pick something to write about and, preferably, that story is cohesive with the rest of your story.
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