Although a majority of people start their consulting career straight from undergraduate or graduate studies as their first full time profession, there is a substantial number of consultants who are experienced hires, coming from a prior career. For experienced hires, the dynamics of pivoting into consulting can be jarring, especially for the uninitiated. To better prepare future experienced hires, I want to highlight four challenges that I have become aware of that experienced hires encounter when transitioning into a consulting career.
1. Years of work experience matters less than engagement specific experience
New experienced hires sometimes get anxious when they realize their colleagues don’t naturally appreciate their prior years of experience. In consulting, what is most immediately valued is engagement specific experience. This means that someone straight out of undergraduate with 3 months of engagement experience may at first be valued by a team more than an experienced hire with 10 years of unrelated professional experience. Until the experienced hire proves their worth on an engagement, their prior experience doesn’t have much immediate relevance, even if it was being an Olympic athlete, Navy SEAL, or the engineer of a world-famous bridge.
2. Experienced hires need to be comfortable with a significantly younger boss
In consulting, it is generally faster to get promoted from within than as an external hire. Hence, experienced hires should expect to come into consulting finding that their supervisor is years younger. One extreme I have witnessed is a 26-year-old Engagement Manager supervising a 42-year-old experienced hire Associate. The norm among experienced hires is however more akin to having supervisors a few years junior. It thereby really helps for experienced hires to come in ready to be humble and not have an ego about seniority and age.
3. There are no established boundaries to your time
Outside of consulting, most professions have structured timelines of when staff are expected to work and when they have time off. In consulting, there is usually less clearly defined lines. Generally, expectations are supposed to be met within a set time frame, but there aren’t exactly defined working hours. A positive of this is that this offers engagement teams a lot of flexibility in defining when and how they work given client considerations. The negative is that aside from major holidays and paid time off, there are no hard boundaries of when work is not expected to take place. I have heard stories of some experienced hires burning out fast because they never negotiated boundaries with their manager, severely damaging their expectations for personal time. The right way to do things is for each consultant to negotiate with their manager regarding personal time expectations. The consultant may not get everything they ask for, but most generally end up with healthy personal time boundaries, sometimes even better hours than industry.
4. Jumping from project to project with new teams can be a difficult reality
Most experienced hires I encounter are fully aware that consulting is an industry where jumping from team to team is a regular occurrence. However, knowing that reality and experiencing that reality are two separate things. Among my consultant friends, I hear stories about experienced hires suffering anxiety due to not having stable teammates they can bond with over the years. There are ways to mitigate the constant shifting of co-workers via robust office or practice bonding activities, but it is definitely not the same thing as a cohesive long lasting team experience.
The Bottom Line
Consulting is an exciting and challenging career path, but it is also notably different from most professions. It helps for experienced hires pivoting into consulting to be emotionally prepared for the workplace culture in order to have the best experience transitioning into consulting and the best odds of success.
Hall Wang is a dual degree MBA and Master of Public Policy graduate from Georgetown University who has recently matriculated into a major management consulting firm. He has worked at America’s most innovative companies including Blue Origin and Facebook, as well as having done two combat deployments as a US Army Officer.
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