Disliking Consulting Travel
Hey all - I am currently a BA/AC/A at an MBB firm and have been traveling constantly for the last few months. Since my case ended, I have been on the beach and have had time to enjoy being home, get into some sort of routine, and overall enjoy life not traveling. Yesterday, I got staffed for next week and I am looking at another two months of consistent travel, since finding out I have been dreading the project. I am not the biggest fan of travel because I have a tougher time making a routine each week and, most of all, I am missing a big part of my life by being away from home. Perhaps everyone feels this way, but all I know is dreading travel like this is probably an indication that consulting is not for me in the long term.
or maybe you can shift to a firm/division with less travel. I heard people consulting financial services don't travel much and there are lot of firms that have less travel in general.
Thats fine. No one says you have to do it long term. Still, try to stay to project leader if you can and then find a really good local exit you are excited about
I can understand that sentiment. If you travel Mon-Fri, it basically feels like you put your life on hold for five days every week. It gets old really quickly.
Two things you can do to influence that:
1) Pick a location and industry combination that involves less travel. For example, NYC office/Financial Services, NJ office/Pharma etc. You may reasonably aspire to sleep at home every night.
2) After the pandemic, some teams have moved away from the classic schedule of flying out to the client site Monday early morning (or Sunday night) and returning Thursday/Friday. If clients work from home as well, there is no reason to fly to their location. This is less straightforward to predict though, and depends on the individual client engagement. So try to understand what the schedule will look like before you get staffed.
HOWEVER, I have personally found that there are also downsides to not traveling. You will still work the same long hours travel or no travel, so it's not like you can typically plan much in terms of evening activities outside work on a weekday even if you are "at home". Plus you may need to constantly manage the expectations of your spouse, who rationally understand that you work long hours, but then still hope every night that you may finish early.
If you hate travel, change firms. People have a very "MBB or nothing" mentality on this forum when it comes to consulting. The T2s offer minimal travel, very interesting work and a great brand name for exit opportunities.
Is it actually true that t2 firms have less travel? I was under the impression they have the same amount of travel as MBB.
Generally yes. LEK rarely travels; same for RB. Kearney also travels quite lightly with a few days on client site only if the project is more ops / transformation focused. OW is similar to Kearney in that it is a mixed bag. But none of them have Mo - Thu at client site as the standard.
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