Is corporate strategy considered back office?

Back office roles generally do not have a great rep. I wanted to know why that is the case given that many corporate strategy/internal consulting roles have fantastic rep. Is corporate strategy just not considered back office even though it's not client facing?

4 Comments
 

Does it matter if it is or isn't? "Back office" jobs are just the corporate function jobs at the bank, like a job you'd find at any other corporate. They don't have a "bad rep" unless you delude yourself into thinking it's an easy backdoor into IB - it's not. 

 

I guess? Back office generally means non revenue generating, so in that sense I guess corp strat is back office. But rest assured that but BB Ops versus BB corp strat would be looked at completely differently. Maybe your grandma wouldn't understand the difference, but any employer would. 

 
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You're overindexing on the term and significance of back office. Typically back office is used in the context of professional services firms to designate the people doing the work (IBers, consultants, etc) vs the people doing admin and support type functions. At consulting and IB firms, those are usually less competitive and lower paid roles

That split doesn't really make sense as a way to look at role desirability outside of professional services (even within professional services there are exceptions for which 'back office' roles could be impactful, competitive, and high paid). In professional services, the core delivery team and partners are the ones coming up with the strategy, selling it, and executing the work -- there's just not a lot of interesting problem solving to be had elsewhere in the org

This isn't true outside of professional services, where functions are siloed and there can be interesting and challenging problem solving in different groups. In addition, with strategy teams in particular there can be an important and interesting role for problem solving at a level higher than the individual functions. Many strategy teams are highly desirable and can be top preference exits for MBB and other consultants. Other strategy teams are not -- there's a high variance in quality

If you're interested in doing strategy work, I would not recommend starting at an internal corporate strategy role if you can get an MBB/T2 offer. The experience at an MBB/T2 will be far more valuable because (1) you're working on problems that have been pre-filtered to be too challenging for an internal strategy team to handle (if such a team even exists at the client), (2) the pace is much faster which is good for learning, (3) the standards and expectations are much higher when providing an expensive report to an external client vs internal stakeholder, and (4) all or almost all of the best strategy teams require prior consulting experience and don't hire fresh undergrads

 

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