McKinsey Defense vs. Deloitte Federal Analytics S&O

I'm a data scientist thinking about two potential opportunities in the federal consulting space: McKinsey Defense vs. Deloitte Federal Analytics S&O. I am hoping to check my impressions of these two organizations. Which might leave better/higher-level exit opportunities into the federal government? And are my impressions of these firms' federal consulting somewhat on-point? In particular, I'm looking to see which would accelerate my career most in the defense arena, or, general fed gov't if that's too narrow.

Deloitte

  • Seems to have larger revenue stream than McKinsey, which may mean greater breadth of projects

  • Might (unsure) accelerate federal careers after working for Deloitte for just 1-2 years (?)

  • More established (or at least, larger analytics practice)

  • Separation between commercial and federal. This, on its own, doesn't matter much, but it does matter to me to the extent that federal consultants are seen as second-class citizens in Deloitte, which translates into different power structures.

McKinsey

  • More prestigious, given its MBB distinction. However, I'm not sure exactly how the impact of its federal projects might differ from Deloitte. Maybe I'm missing something, but the bullets that I see here (mckinseyDOTcom/industries/public-sector/how-we-help-clients/defense-and-security) (I'm a new user so I can't directly post URLs) don't seem to show how their projects substantially differ in scale/impact from what I've seen with Deloitte.

  • More overlap between commercial/federal, or, at least there isn't a firm divide. This may be a little less true with defense consulting, but still.

  • May be likely to more quickly accelerate a career, relative to Deloitte? I see a couple of LinkedIn profiles where people work at McKinsey for ~2 years and get a 'senior advisor' position at the State Department. As with the above, maybe I'm missing something, but I have the impression that it accelerates careers more quickly than Deloitte, even in the federal space.

2 Comments
 

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