Pros and Cons of Consultancy
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Want to know in five minutes whether management consultancy is the right path for you?
That kind of impatience probably means you definitely have it in you to be a blue-chip consultant. If you're still not sure though, we've put together a list of the five best and five worst things about being a management consultant.
5 BEST things about being a Management Consultant
Financial Benefits
Show me the money. Let's not beat about the bush - the major reason for talented university graduates considering the world of consultancy (or indeed banking, accounting and finance) is not a deep love of business process design. It is money. Consultancy graduate schemes are notoriously financially generous - not as much as the banks perhaps - but still extremely respectable. Accenture offers a starting salary of £31,500 and IBM £30,000. The current average graduate salary is around £18,000. Not a tough calculation. And that does not even take in to account the other benefits that frequently accompany that salary - medical insurance, interest-free loans and so on.
Training
As part of their graduate sell, most consultancies trumpet the vast opportunities for 'professional development' they offer. These are indubitably a major feather in the cap of management consultancy. As well as the induction training you receive when you join a consultancy (which is usually extensive and high quality), most companies offer a bewildering array of opportunities to train throughout your time at the firm. Some (such as Deloitte) will support you through externally recognised qualifications such as MBAs. Not only is the availability of training usually very good, it is worth bearing in mind how incredibly expensive it is to enroll on such training outside of the company - costs often hit hundreds of pounds for a course.
The People
Like a broken record, every consultancy says that its people are everything. This is true. It is very easy to be cynical about this, but there is little doubt you will meet some great people in consultancy. Having spent so much on recruitment, management consultancies are very good at getting their cultural mix right. This means your colleagues will more often than not be fun, dynamic and like-minded people to work and socialise with. Work hard, play hard really does apply to the vast majority of projects. IBM's 'Jams' - collaborations involving hundreds of thousands of people, are a particularly amazing example of the value consultancies place on people and their ideas.
Credibility
If you're here, you've made it. Well, maybe not quite yet if you're just out of university. But the fact is that having a blue-chip consultancy name on your CV will do you absolutely no harm for the rest of your career. People recognise the reputation these firms have, and will treat you accordingly. Even better, your business background can be further supplemented with the projects you have worked on - and if you're working for a major consultancy firm, some of the clients for those projects are likely to be equally major names with equally strong reputations. Work for a consultancy for two years, and you may be able to list five or six world-class companies on your CV by the time you're 25. Not bad.
Challenge
You've just come out of university where after maybe two years of sloth, you've done a year or two (or even more) of serious taxing intellectual endeavor. Your synapses have never been so sharp. Now you're presented with the prospect of a million jobs where the toughest thing you may have to do all day is construct a pie chart in Excel. Doesn't sound great does it? Management consultancy is still a job, but it is does at least offer a great deal more brain stimulation than most. You will have to learn a lot fast. Every new project means learning new skills and new material, keeping the grey matter ticking over. If you like a challenge, management consultancy is far better placed to provide it than the vast majority of corporate alternatives - including the big bucks in finance.
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5 WORST things about being a Management Consultant
Hours
Frequently long. Your contract will probably say 9 - 5:30 with an hour for lunch. Most management consultants will not work a single seven and a half hour day in their entire careers. This is not because they spend all day on Facebook either (in most cases). There is always lots to be done on a project, and rarely enough hours in the day. Once you reach the stage in your career where meetings become a serious occupational hazard, the only time when you can do any real work is outside business hours. Horror stories of 18 hour days are uncommon, but do happen, particularly when projects reach squeaky-bum time around deployment. Expect to have to cancel social appointments on occasion.
Repetition
Consultancy may be far more interesting and challenging than your average nine-to-five, but it is work, and often extremely repetitive. First roles in particular can leave much to be desired in terms of variety. You will become an expert in things you really didn't much want to be an expert in - Excel, Powerpoint, Microsoft Project - and the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keys on your laptop will wear out in weeks. Projects are at least much shorter than your average job (usually around six months), but as your aim should be to become a subject matter expert, you may end up being handpicked for your next role on the basis of your expertise...and end up doing almost exactly the same thing again.
Stress
It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Unsurprisingly in a field which is all about coming up with quick solutions to major problems, stress is the constant companion of the ambitious management consultant. Long hours, difficult deadlines, a lot of money on the line - it all adds up. Maintaining a work-life balance is extremely difficult, and many consultants find it tricky to switch off from the day-to-day, particularly when that day is 12 hours long. The high attrition rate in management consultancy is well-known (around 20% in most consultancies) and a lot of it is down to the pressures of the job.
The 'Corporate Culture'
If you haven't seen any of the cartoon Dilbert or the fantastic film Office Space, you really should. Both capture perfectly the absurdity of much that goes on in the corporate world. Unnecessary buzzwords and acronyms, the total ability to use normal English and the inexplicable need to explain a simple concept over fifteen pages are all common business crimes, and management consultants are amongst the very worst offenders. Office politics and unnecessary jargon can be found in every industry, but consultancy especially excels.
Reputation
As a management consultant you have to reconcile with yourself the fact that you have, basically, sold out. Management consultants do not have a particularly good public image, seen mostly as exceptionally hard-working drones who rarely see daylight. Worse than that, consultancy failures on high profile public projects (see Private Eye for a regular dose of consultant incompetence) have led to consultants being portrayed as overpaid wasters who are sucking away vast amounts of public money for little discernable return. Also bear in mind that introducing yourself as a management consultant at parties is not going to get you very far - even with other consultants.
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