McKinsey Operations vs Digital vs No Designator
When applying to McKinsey you have the options of selecting a city, or a city with an focus on operations or Digital. I understand the digital side is technology focus and operations is extracting value from day-to-day activities. Is applying as an analyst with no designator on operations or digital the same as applying to the strategy team? Or is applying to a city and not selecting operations/digital put you in the running for all teams?
All the teams (other than Operations I guess) are strategy, including digital. If you affiliate with a practice, it means you get first preference on staffing for those projects. You can do just as much work in other industries as people who are unaffiliated with a specific practice. If you are unaffiliated, it just means you don't get first preference on staffing for cases in a certain industry.
If you are interested in tech, for example, there's no downside to joining the Digital practice because you then get first preference on the digital projects and also get to do as much non-tech work as you want.
If you have no idea what you're interested in at this point, then don't affiliate with a practice. That's basically all the decision making process is.
The application process for someone who does not affiliate with a certain practice vs. someone who does want to affiliate (generalist) is 100% the same and equally competitive. If you apply to Digital McKinsey, for example, you will do all the same cases (meaning it's often not even tech related cases) as someone who is unaffiliated with any practice.
Just pick whatever practice you're interested, and if you don't know what that is, there's obviously nothing wrong with being a generalist (many people join McKinsey just to discover what interests them).
Understood, thank you. In my case, my university consulting work is all operations, but my internship experience is all corporate strategy, so I could apply for a city with no affiliation and try both (Ops and Strategy)? Would that be an advisable decision?
I don't know that any of that matters, I'd just pick the city and practice (if any) that interests you.
For example, some cities (like NYC and Chicago) are going to be more competitive and have more applicants. That doesn't mean you should apply to cities you wouldn't want to live in.
It's hard to game the system, I would just do what interests you to be honest.
Thank you for your guidance, I will apply without a specific affiliation to ops. strategy, or digital in a city that I love. My main worry was it being easier/harder to get in without a affiliation vs with one (in ops or similar). Thank you for clearing that up, I am glad to hear that the difficulty remains the same across.
I agree with everything you said, except that even the Operations practice is considered to be “strategy” and working in it is the same role as someone would be doing as a generalist, except a generalist would be doing more work across all the areas including operations but also digital, marketing and sales, etc. Working in Operations or any other specialization in the Implementation practice is totally different, but that’s also a whole different application process.
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There's not any difference between these roles in terms of competitiveness or opportunities. I've heard that joining a practice like Digital can help in terms of developing a network in the firm early on, but you can do as much work inside or outside of your practice as you'd like so I wouldn't weight it heavily.
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