What do you actually do as a junior MBB consultant?
I have a background in banking and PE with internships at GS, an MM bank and a couple of PE firms. I'm not a big fan of the IB due to the hours but also due to the fact that 90% of your job consists of boring and braindead tasks. I'm interested in switching to consulting at an MBB firm when starting my full-time career and would like to understand the practical work better.
I used to think that IB seemed extremely exciting given you got to work on large deals that were of great strategic importance etc. I later noticed that 90% of your work consists of admin / data digging / formatting with an extreme hierarchy where any form of individual thinking is strictly prohibited.
I don't want to make the same mistake again and have a glorified image of consulting just to discover it is as boring as banking. I know that consultants do projects including CDDs, CVDDs, expansion to new markets, pricing, cost-cutting, growth strategy etc. But practically, what does a junior MBB consultant actually do on these projects?
Primary research - interviewing experts, client representatives, customers or competitors for info
Secondary research - scouring the internet for data and info
Data book design and prep
File management
Storyboarding and deck design
That’s about 90% of what you’ll do.
Pretty accurate.
On a more mundane note, you'll spend so much time in meetings (at least in PEG/PIPE), between your morning huddle, content session, LT session, afternoon huddle, and then those calls / interviews mentioned above. Actual production time will often be limited during the day and / or pushed to the late afternoon / evening.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but just something that surprised me a bit when I got started.
Great info. I think this is pretty similar to IB where you are tied up in meetings and getting ad-hoc tasks with short deadlines from clients / seniors throughout the day. Evenings and weekends feel like the only time where you can actually work on presentations / larger tasks without constantly getting interrupted.
On the plus side, neither I nor anyone I know has ever worked weekends, so that at least should make life a bit nicer :)
So jealous of consultants for this
To add to OP, I always thought consultancy was the career vs IB that used youe brain more and I always heard consuktants being mentally drained after work. the job description described doesn't sound that mentally draining tbf or am I missing something?
I can second this is pretty accurate of the day-to-day.
Don’t you have support serviced for data books etc?
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