In which way are consulting and banking different in terms of skills and competencies required?

Hey Peter Davies, I'll answer this to the best of my ability.

**Common skill sets: **

• Slide Building: both consulting and investment banking firms will ask their entry level employees to work on the appendices of slides, adjusting the font, size, and colour scheme.
• Financial Modelling (limited in consulting): Obviously, investment banking focuses the majority of their time in constructing financial models; but the basic and intermediate use of excel to construct models like revenue projection or cost analysis is apparent in consulting.
• Report Construction: Both fields focus heavily on written reports as deliverables, whether that be a part of a slidedeck, or accompanying one.
• Communication: As the case with most roles within finance, the core common skill set developed in either of these positions are both soft and technical skills within communication. Presentation, interpersonal, written, verbal communication are all highly sought after for more senior positions.

Differences: * Within Investment banking, the function of the role and the objective to achieving the function is to sell companies to clients through rigorous and meticulous analysis of the financials of the company. This necessitates a deeper understanding of financial modelling.

• Within consulting, the function of the role and the objective to achieving the function is to solve a complex, vaguely defined problem of a company through interviews, research gathering, and consolidation of data of both the financials and other metrics (customer demographics, product mix, etc.). This necessitates a deeper understanding of data analytics.

Although both use a similar technical skill set, the underlying objective and mindset is vastly different. Since many of the skill sets overlap, consulting firms look to investment banking analysts to hire.