Minimum years experience to be considered "experienced hire" at MBB
Since graduating from college I've been working in strategy in-house for a top-50 company in my country. I've been starting to think about long-term horizons and am thinking of opportunities to make the leap into MBB. I don't have the shiniest GPA, but I made it into the process for a few firms as an undergrad, and my boss is a very senior MBB alum.
How many years should I stick around in my current role so that I can leap into MBB at above-grad level (e.g. Associate for McK instead of BA; Consultant for BCG instead of Associate)? And if possible, what are the paths to doing that without having to go for an MBA first (and how many years of "experience" would an MBA compensate for)? If I can hit my next career goal without having to drop the $50k+ on an MBA then naturally that's preferable.
I recently read an article at Management Consulted saying that "anything above 2+ years of work experience is an experienced hire" but I'm not from the US and not sure whether this applies to MBB.
In the US, there are very very few people that get hired into post-MBA roles with the kind of experience you are talking about. There's not really a reason to do so. We can fill every seat with MBA (and PhD etc) hires, why would we hire folks out of corporate strategy groups?
If that's the case, why are experienced hires recruited so often? What backgrounds would they usually have?
If you want to be a consultant (and aren't just in it for the prestige), then you need to start developing a more realistic path.
Experienced hire means one of two things for consulting firms. Either you are an experienced consultant and have done similar (note the word similar - human capital consulting in KPMG's M&A practice isn't going to lead to a generalist role at Bain) consulting at a similar firm (same tier, one tier down, MAYBE two tiers down - the latter is more common when you see whole teams move etc).
The other thing experienced means is significant industry related experience and/or functional expertise. Significant could mean that you are an exec recruiting for a partner role (to sell your expertise for project work) or that you have 3-5 years of functional expertise and are recruiting at the junior level (now you're an asset to junior/mid level staff who can leverage your knowledge with their toolkits). The difficulty is, internal strategy isn't really a function. The expertise required in internal strategy is what the consulting firms have already bred in house, and they're largely better at it.
If you really want to be a consultant and don't want to do an MBA (why not? your situation fits their target market perfectly), it would make much, much more sense for you to target (as a stretch) the consulting arms of big 4/etc firms. I.e. PwC consulting (non-Strategy&), EY (non-Parthenon), Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, IBM. Tier 2 firms (Strat&/Deloitte S&O/Parthenon/OW/LEK/ATK) are going to present many of the same difficulties as MBB. These roles won't be a walk in the park for you to land either but it's potentially doable. After 2-3 years, you can take another stretch and apply for the T2 strategy arms listed above, and from there to MBB 2-3 years later. In terms of progression, you're probably looking at analyst level for the first move, either analyst/associate for the second depending on where you are (don't apply up to associate as an analyst), and associate level for MBB.
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