Management Consulting Consulting

Consulting runs on projects, usually a few weeks to a few months each. A week on a typical engagement starts with travel to the client at many firms, then days of interviews with client staff, data requests, analysis, and slides. The team meets every morning to agree what the partner needs to see that week.

As a junior you own a workstream: one piece of the problem, such as sizing a market, mapping a cost base, or surveying customers. You build the Excel analysis, turn it into pages, and present it to the client manager. Late nights come before steering committee meetings, when the deck has to be right.

Between projects you are on the beach: helping with proposals, internal research, or training until the next staffing. Every new project is a new industry and a new team, which is the point.

What juniors hand in

• Slide decks: the storyline, the analysis behind each page, and the executive summary.
• Excel models for market sizing, cost reduction, pricing, and business cases.
• Interview guides and syntheses of what client staff and customers said.
• Surveys and their analysis.
• Benchmarking against competitors and best practice.
• Commercial due diligence reports for private equity buyers on a tight timeline.

Strategy firms (MBB and peers)

McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and a tier of strategy firms below them. Generalist entry, structured training, and the strongest pull into business school and the buy side.

Big Four advisory

Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG run large consulting and deal advisory arms. Wider range of work, including implementation and technology, and often more predictable travel.

Boutiques

Smaller firms focused on a sector (healthcare, energy) or a function (pricing, operations). Earlier responsibility and a narrower brand.

Economic consulting

Analysis for litigation and regulators: damages, antitrust, and expert testimony support. More econometrics, less travel, and close to academic work.

Private equity due diligence

A practice at most strategy firms: answering, in two or three weeks, whether a PE fund should buy a company. Fast, finance-adjacent, and a direct line to PE contacts.

Levels

Undergraduates join as business analysts or associates. After two to three years most are promoted to a post-MBA level or leave. Case team, then engagement manager, then partner.

Corporate and public sector clients, through the partner who sold the work. Your day-to-day client is usually a manager or director inside the company who needs the answer and has to sell it upward.

Private equity funds are a major client for due diligence work. Internally you serve your engagement manager, whose storyline your pages have to support.

Typically 55 to 70 hours a week, better than IB and worse than most corporate roles. Travel adds to it: at firms that staff on site, Monday morning flights and Thursday night returns are common.

Hours spike before client meetings and steering committees and ease between projects. Due diligence work runs hotter than most.

Highly structured, with fixed deadlines rather than rolling review at most strategy firms. Applications for the junior summer typically open in summer and early fall of junior year, with one or two rounds of deadlines.

Early-identification and diversity programs for sophomores and freshmen run from spring onward and can fast-track you. Case interviews decide most outcomes, and practicing them with a partner is the single most useful thing you can do.

Freshman and sophomore year

Join a consulting club, do pro bono or student consulting projects, and apply to sophomore and diversity programs.

Sophomore spring and summer

Learn case frameworks, then forget them as frameworks. Practice cases with partners until you can structure any problem out loud.

Summer before junior year

Talk to consultants at the firms you want, attend recruiting events, and refine the resume. Applications open at many firms.

Early fall of junior year

Deadlines. Some firms add an online test or a game-style assessment.

First round

Two or so case interviews plus fit questions. Many firms run them on or near campus.

Final round

Two or three more cases with partners, often on the same day or within a week. Offers come quickly.

Junior summer

A real project on a client team. Return offers come at the end.

You like taking a messy problem apart and building a plan with a team. You want to try several industries before you commit to one.

You can live out of a suitcase for a while, and you like how many doors this leaves open. You enjoy presenting and persuading as much as analyzing.

Not for you if you want deep finance skills, if constant travel sounds miserable, or if you want to own outcomes rather than recommend them. If you know you want deals and valuation, IB is the more direct door.

• Structuring an ambiguous problem into answerable questions.
• Excel analysis and slide writing with a clear storyline.
• Interviewing executives and synthesizing what they said.
• Presenting to senior people and handling pushback.
• Learning a new industry in a week.
• Working inside client organizations and their politics.

Next to IB

IB is finance: valuation, capital structure, transactions. Consulting is broader business problems, with less modeling and more structuring, interviewing, and storytelling.

Next to Corp Dev

Corporate strategy makes the call from inside one company. Consulting advises many, with more variety and more hours.

Next to PE

PE buys companies; consulting often tells PE whether to buy them. Due diligence work is the bridge between the two.

Business school is the classic step, with many firms sponsoring it. Corporate strategy and operations roles, startups, and general management hire consultants steadily.

Private equity hires consultants mostly into operations and portfolio roles and some deal seats, especially from PE due diligence practices. Growth equity and VC also take consultants with a sector focus.

You need a business major.

Strategy firms hire every major, and many hire science and engineering students on purpose. The case interview is the test.

Case interviews are about memorizing frameworks.

Interviewers see the same frameworks all day. They reward a structure built for the problem in front of you and clear math.

Consulting is a good way into banking.

It is a better way into PE operations, strategy, and business school. Moving into banking from consulting is uncommon.

Only MBB counts.

Big Four advisory, boutiques, and economic consulting place well into their own exits and often offer better hours or more responsibility.