Consulting is a career where you hit the ground running. Having a clear direction and strategy for your career early on can grant you amazing advantages, but so can keeping your options open and exploring the opportunities offered by consulting.
This article identifies what lies ahead for graduates considering a future in consulting, and highlights key insights that I gained by interviewing junior and senior consultants.
1. Brace yourself
It is well known that consulting comes with long hours, time pressure, busy periods, and high performance expectations. Look sharp, be ready to learn on the job, and embrace new projects and opportunities. There’s a common phrase among consultants that ‘a year in consulting is worth two years elsewhere.’ In addition to industry specific knowledge, consulting equips you with highly transferable business and management skills. These are learned in a trial by fire manner. It may sound like a challenge, but you are unlikely to regret it.
2. The joys of consulting
Consulting offers many attractive benefits.
Management consultants get the opportunity to work on challenging real world problems for companies, governments and nonprofits. This can be fulfilling as it has the potential to positively impact employees, customers and whole organisations. With the client exposure, analytical thinking and high performance expectations, a career in consulting will not be boring.
For those who have an interest in specific industries as well as how they operate, consulting can offer you unique access to key decision makers and real time data. Despite the long working hours, consulting firms are often highly accommodating, offering you a lot of flexibility as to how you get your work done, be it at home or in the office. Consulting firms also place a lot of importance on networking, which means you are likely to make life changing connections.
Travel is an alluring carrot that attracts many young people towards consulting. However, the novelty of weekly business trips and lonely hotel rooms is likely to wear off quickly unless you stay organised and make the most of the wonderful experience this offers.
Lastly, before you join a consulting firm, be sure to find out about its workplace culture. While top consulting firms all have similarly professional high-performance cultures, there are subtle differences when it comes to work-life balance or the emphasis placed on fostering a friendly social atmosphere. It can be hard to assess work culture from the outside looking in, but finding a firm that is a good cultural fit for your personality can make your work life more enjoyable and productive.
3. Exit opportunities
Most consultants expect to stay in the industry for 2-3 years. Management consulting firms often use an ‘up or out’ model where you either increasingly add value and are promoted up through the ranks or you are ‘counseled out’ of the firm. ‘Counseling out’ involves a process of performance feedback over a period of time, the end result of which is moving on to other opportunities.
The consulting ‘up or out’ model exists for good reason. Top consulting firms employ a pyramid structure, in which there are relatively few partners and a large number of business analysts. Every year consulting firms hire new high achieving young graduates, meaning that recruits from last year must move up or move out.
One risk in consulting is becoming a jack of all trades. It is more beneficial to be a subject matter expert and develop knowledge and skills in a specific industry or functional area. You may need to be open minded at the beginning of your career to different industries and projects, but once you find your niche only diversify to the point where it helps you grow in that area. Be responsible enough to put your hand up for promotion, and converse with those responsible for promotion to find out what they expect.
Beware of the optimistic views that career growth and credibility come automatically from who you work for. These aspects are significantly self driven, and as you shift from one firm to another, you will always be evaluated on the merits of your work. Being in the industry for 5 years does not guarantee you’ll become a partner simply because someone else has achieved that. Your industry experience depends on how long you have worked with a specific industry, not how long you’ve been a consultant overall.
A typical consulting career involves a lot of client engagement. As your client relationships grow, your currency within the firm will grow and it’s common for consultants to later on be hired directly by a former client.
All of the above information is emphasized so you do not overestimate the leverage you have when evaluating prospective employers and exit opportunities. Much of your career growth depends on your experience, subject matter expertise, prior contributions, client relationships, and whether you seize the opportunities that come up. Great exit opportunities include positions in other firms that are more senior than your current one.
The worst case scenario for a consulting career is that it isn’t for you and you do not have the passion to sustain the long hours, you don’t deliver value nor do you receive support from your firm. In this case, it’s best to leave early. If you don’t then you are setting yourself up for failure when trying to exit the firm after a few years of a sustained low performance track record. This record reduces the leverage you have as a prospective employee, limiting your exit opportunities.
4. The valuable consultant
This is a person who consistently does his work well. A person who delivers implementable insights to clients while also paying attention to detail. A person who identifies an internal process of the firm that could be improved and develops a reasonable proposed solution before raising it. This demonstrates regard for others and a serving nature.
There will be times when the consultants who start a project are not the same ones who finish it. It is vital to keep records of everything you do structured in a manner that is easy for colleagues and the client to navigate.
Maintaining a separate personal life by establishing a regular routine is also valuable. After all, clients want to work with people who relaxed, friendly and well balanced. According to psychologists, a well rounded individual will maintain a reasonable level of health in six different areas of life: physical, mental, emotional, social, work/financial, and spiritual. Focusing too much on one aspect at the expense of the rest is like trying to fly a 747 on one engine. It can be done for a while, but it’s not sustainable in the long run.
Consultants with soft skills set themselves apart. When you communicate, think about your audience, the words you are using, and whether they are likely to understand. When you listen, listen actively. Give the speaker your full attention, be open to learning something new, and encourage the speaker with a friendly smile or a nod of your head. Try to understand the speaker’s meaning, paraphrase your understanding, and ask follow up questions to expand or focus the conversion on important points.
When working in a team, do your job well so others don’t have to. If there are conflicts or differences of opinion, focus on the issues, without attacking or implicating your colleagues. Be loyal to your team in addition to being clear about your boundaries early on.
Conclusion
There is a lot to look forward to as a management consultant, and the industry is an excellent career starting point for young graduates. If you are a high achiever looking to accelerate your career, it would be well worth finding out more about the industry and the opportunities it offers.
Ruce Ndlala is an accounting student at the University of Cape Town, and former President of the UCT Consulting Club.
Image: Pexels
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