Incoming BA
I am an incoming BA at mckinsey in a U.S. regional office. I was a history major in college and don’t have any excel and ppt experience. What should I do to prepare before I start?
Jan 29, 2023
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on the Youtubes and start learning and practicing. PPTX is pretty easy to learn, and is really just formatting and is really just more time consuming than anything. So I'd recommend an easy 80-85% lean towards Excel vs PPTX study.Key words? VLIOOKUP, INDEX MATCH and Pivot Tables. Most of those tutorials online also have sample workbooks to work on along with the videos for some actual hands-on.
Thank you! OP here. How much should I prepare before I start? Is this 5-hour course enough? Should I start building models online? Are there any textbooks I should read/work through? I am scared I will be behind my peers who did the internship before or were business majors.
Lord no that five hours is nowhere near enough practice. I'd steer away from textbooks and stick to the video tutorials and their follow-along workbooks because they'll be a lot more helpful. Plow through every tutorial you can find, look up any and all questions that come up because there'll be plenty of others asking on places like Quora too.
Thank you! How many months or so of prep do you think I should do before I start, right now I'm thinking of doing ~20 hours a week for two months? I will focus on Excel. Is there any McK specific Excel advice you have or is it the same pretty much across most firms?
Can't speak to McK specifics and their targets for Excel. For practice, just keep at it. Don't let yourself think there is some hard number of hours per month you need. Find all the training exercises you can and work through them and if you get stumped, look it up online and push on. It's honestly not like memorizing a map of all 50 states and making it rote. Excel is very much taught through learning from doing.
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