Introduction & possible next career step

Hi all,

Why I am here?

I would like to explore if my next career step. My question boils down to this:

What next career step will I learn the most useful skills.

introduction:

I am Wes from the Netherlands. I have about 3+ years work experience of which 1.5 as an in-house management consultant role at a financial service (insurance/pensions/mortgages/asset management) working on business process automation, IT cloud solutions, and implementations of new accounting standards. In this role my direct colleagues were 90% strategy/management consultants from Roland Berger.

After this, I transitioned to an investor relations role, at same financial service company (listed between EUR 10 - 15 billion market cap). My main responsibilities are to service several equity research analysts (Autonomous, UBS, Morning star), understand and write-up our own results i.e. deliver presentation / press release and Q&As in collaboration with C level management of business units to present to group senior management. Currently, I work with 3 other (very) senior colleagues (20-25 years of work experience), with backgrounds in equity research and consulting (McKinsey/Deloitte) and a director of finance. I am learning a good amount and am performing very well. 

Lastly, I did a 4 months equity research internships, mostly biotech/food In Amsterdam about 3 years ago.

This is where I am at the moment. Why I am here and where would I like to be in 8 - 10 years. 

I would like to build up a skill set that will allow me to join a scale-up at a fairly senior level, where I can be seen as a valuable partner to aid the company to grow its business strategically and optimize business processes.

I asked myself how do I get there?

On a very high-level I think I have about 3 or 4 options. 

1) Transition into product development type role in current company

2) Join a start-up/scale-up 

3) Go into strategy/management consulting

4) Go into VC or investment banking with aim to transition to VC/growth equity/scale-up later

Considerations and your thoughts.

Having had experience in both consulting and a corporate finance role, I think the financial/numbers side of equity research/investment banking suits me better than consulting. Having said that, both are learnable as both as 'just' skillsets.

I would like to explore if my next career step. My question boils down to this:

What next career step will I learn the most useful skills.

Happy to hear your thoughts and thank you for the inputs. Please feel free to give me direction on interesting articles to read on here to make the decision.

Best,

Wes