Do You Enjoy Management Consulting?
Simple question, and a pretty fundamental topic that I didn't see on a quick breeze through the forums.
By 'enjoy' I mean, do you actually look forward to working every day? Are the hours so demanding that the work becomes meaningless? Do the negative aspects of travel outweigh the positives? Is the compensation and prestige worth the hassle?
As someone that is considering shooting for MBB a few years down the road (post-MBA), I'd really like to hear people's thoughts on the matter. Obviously, there isn't a job in the world where every day is cupcakes, rainbows, and puppies; but, generally speaking, what do you consultants think of your work?
I, and hopefully some others, would greatly appreciate some insight...
I interned at a top consulting firm and decided that consulting is not for me. What bothered me is that we had absolutely no idea what we were talking about...the client knew way better what was going on and just hired us to cut some costs (so that it did not seem that it was their idea).
1. You were just an intern. Lack of both experience and industry expertise.
2. Depends on the type of consulting. But typically, they expect you to come in and solve problems for them right away. Not exactly the kind of profession for fresh grads.
50/50 for liking it. It depends on the project, the PM, and how underpaid you feel on a given day ;)
A bit different from SeaUrchin. in our case, we generally have a good idea because we tend to be more back office focused, and we analyze the information (which is usually dirty) so we tend to get a better picture of their current state than they do. We can generally do this a bit faster than them as well because of experience, working longer hours, and having some basic tools and approaches ready.
As for being really innovative, we certainly aren't there in most of our projects. Almost all the "answers" I've seen are more incremental improvements to companies...and in many cases just helping them actually understand what a world class operation looks like. Maybe MBB consultants see more of the "creating a new world" than I do. We do have the occasional project I see in our database where we created something new, innovative but those account for maybe 1/1,000 projects.
Although MBB certainly does some less glamorous projects too - I just came across at a client MBB doing a basic analysis of where "Shadow HR" exists to help consolidate it....something we were doing for an IT department at another client. Could just be the smaller Canadian market though.
And, even if you don't like it, you'll appreciate the experience as you get older, if you can stick out 2 years.
TT
Loooooooooooool, you are such a douche.
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