This thread is eye-opening to me also since I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from this world IRL.
There are many types of consulting jobs, and not all of them are hell on earth.
My daughter got a job right out of college in litigation consulting, an obscure little world in which economics nerds help lawyers prepare for complex legal cases (commercial disputes, intellectual property, etc.).
She and her young colleagues learned a great deal from their jobs, earned good (but not outrageously high) salaries, rarely worked more than 50 hours a week, rarely had to travel, were treated like professionals, had access to lots of free food, and were invited to go on a free ski trip every winter.
And they were all expected to leave after three or four years.
Why were they expected to leave? Because all the higher-ups in this type of consulting have advanced degrees, usually PhDs. You can’t progress directly from the jobs that the kids get (they’re called analysts) to the higher-level jobs in the firm.
The kids know this. This isn’t a long-term career for them. This is a way station between college and some sort of graduate school (usually business school, although some go into PhD programs).
There doesn’t seem to be any soul-sucking in this particular environment. In fact, I think it’s a pretty good arrangement. The company gets highly qualified support staff, the kids get good work experience, and when it’s time to leave, they can do so openly, without sneaking around. (In fact, the company goes out of its way to assist them when they apply for graduate programs.)
What’s not to like?
I had a position just like Marian’s D right out of school and left after two years with great recs to highly ranked PhD programs. It was a great use of my econ/public policy training and I learned a lot. Also low stress, good pay, fun group of fellow analysts (but no ski trip!)
My D has been almost 4 years at her consulting job at a large firm. When her projects end, it is up to her to network in the company and find another project she is interested in. So she does have some control. The company has programs for mentoring younger employees, and she feels she has learned a lot from the senior staff she has met. She will go to school full time for an MBA in another year (at her company you have to fund it yourself, but they will reimburse you if you go back there afterward.) She doesn’t mind working more than 40 hrs a week now, and could eventually stay with her company and become a partner. Hard to say what may happen.
@VANURSEPRAC Yes she is an actuary. There are many actuarial consultants, most of whom do work essentially outsourced by companies that don’t have the needed actuarial staffing or expertise.
While the origin of these firms back in the 80s and 90s was as a spinoff, they are far from their original roots now. Not really recognizable in that way. Accenture is publicly traded and no longer even a partnership, for example.
Far more students are likely to end up at the ‘business consulting’ firms, as you call them. McKenzie has 17,000 employees (mostly MBAs). Accenture alone has 375,000, and you don’t need an MBA to get a job there. While I agree that often student posters are saying they want the McKinsey type experience, the OP here was referring to another thread on consulting lifestyle for that poster’s kid – and I’d bet dollars to donuts that kid in the other thread was at one of the “business consulting firms”.
A quick example to illustrate what some posters are talking about:
A dear friend of mine was at one of the McKinsey etc. firms. She LOVED her work, although her lifestyle was crazy. Her big area of interest was finding the right metrics to use for measurements and comparisons across competitors within an industry. Like in the airline industry, the metric is the seat-mile. What’s your profit per seat-mile, what’s your staffing per seat-mile etc. So she invented those metrics for other industries.
Thanks everyone–fascinating glimpse into worlds I know nothing about!
This thread is a perfect example of how many kids don’t end up in areas of study or fields that they have had exposure to.
I, for one have known what business or economic degrees are even for. There seem to be engineering and coding camps everywhere (kid has been to a couple) but nothing about business.
My D is a consultant, but her industry is a bit different. She began as a consultant who assisted a hospital in implementing an electronic medical records system. She was not employed by the EMR system, which had its own consultants. Instead, she worked for an independent firm that bridged the EMR company and the hospital. D worked to assist the implementation of the systems from the doctors’ standpoint … understanding their processes, working with the software folks, helping the doctors work with the new system, and troubleshooting. Other people in her organization had different roles - there were nurses, pharmacists, software folks, and business folks who all had their own part in the consulting process. She has another consulting job now - her firm is setting up an affordable care organization from the ground up for an investment group … it’s pretty amazing what they are doing. D travels 80% of the time, although her new job is 80% travel only 3 weeks out of 4; she works in her home city the 4th week. (She has a BA in Medicine, Health & Society.)
DH has been a management consultant for a couple of the big firms for almost 20 years now. He runs engagements all over the world. I laughed at the comment up thread that the “lifestyle is challenging.” To say the least. He has traveled 100% of the time for 17 of those years (Istanbul for nine months straight once) and it’s beyond old. He’s ready to come off the road and plans to retire at the end of this year. As to what he does all day–he is umbilically connected to his phone and laptop. His life is nothing but meetings, proposals, presentations, and airports. We haven’t had a vacation together in over 12 years, just a handful of “family” vacations where DS and I were with him over the weekend in a city he was working in. He’s been my weekend boyfriend all these years. It works for us, but we are both looking forward to actually living a normal life together again soon. Consulting is not for the faint of heart.
Thanks everyone. I am not the OP, but S is interested in possibly pursuing this line of work after he graduates. He is currently working on something like this now (as an undergrad) and loves it. It’s very useful to me to read the posts from those of you ho have knowledge of the consulting profession.
There are some plusses for the young ones who travel. They are allowed to fly to non-home destinations on the weekend and so some of them make full use of it to visit different places each weekend.
@ChoatieMom My husband’s experience was very different from your husband’s career. His work was in the chemical industry. His work at the mid-sized consulting firm had a lot of their clients in Texas, where we lived at the time. When he moved on to “big” consulting, his travel increased greatly, but on the plus side they paid for our move back to the Chicago area.
20 yrs of consulting for your husband is a long time. My husband knew fairly early that he was going to do it for a limited amount of time…it was about 7 yrs…and during that period of our life, we made saving a priority. We never really escalated our spending to match our “D.I.N.K.” status. (remember that acronym?..dual income, no kids) We were lucky things worked out well for us.
@88jm19: We used to live in the Boston area during The Big Dig. Logan become untenable. We moved to the SW to a better climate and an airport that never closes which improved logistics. We were DINKs for 20 years, then I found out I was four months pregnant after being told we’d never have kids. Well, life is funny. Saving has always been a priority for us, too. Consulting is lucrative, retirement will be comfortable. We thought we’d be able to spend more time with our late-born son in retirement, but he chose the military. Again, life is funny. I hear “Cats in the Cradle.”
@ChoatieMom That song is amazing! Part of the reason my husband chose a very early retirement, to the great surprise of many, was to spend meaningful time with our children. He has been a very involved dad and we have absolutely no regrets.
Here’s how some wags on the internet have been known to explain consulting:
The American business model begins with a farm and two cows. The farmer sells one cow, and asks the other to produce the milk of four cows. Before long, the second cow drops dead. Consultants are the folks he hires to figure out why.
There are more serious responses out there, but I’ll let people who actually know what they’re saying answer OP’s question.
I was told that a consultant looks at your watch and tells you what time it is.
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Having been there, my experience (lots of time on M&A projects) was that we were the ones doing the dirty work after the CEOs shook hands and said for the cameras how great the synergies were going to be after the merger. We were the ones who had to figure out how to actually get the systems to merge and work after that press release, and try to make it so the employees could do their jobs in the new environment. We were the ones staying until 10 every night and in on weekends (employees usually go home at 5) – I worked 100 hour weeks sometimes.
And we often had to do it with the worst work conditions. I had clients who did not assign me a desk, even though I was full time at their location – I had to wait until a temp left their space to get access to a phone & computer. I had clients who gave me the slowest f-ing desktop (and forget having a laptop, you are a consultant - spit) in the building – resulting in longer hours because it loaded emails at a pace of one a minute. (Never mind what that minute was costing them, they didn’t care). I had clients who turned their backs on me when I walked into their office for an interview. Not every client location was like this, but plenty were.
You need thick skin to stick with consulting for a long time. Even without the “wags” and their dumb jokes.
It need not be soul-sucking work, @garland. I run a small niche management consulting firm and we work on the most interesting problems. We get called in when our clients, who are largely major corporations (and sometimes entrepreneurs or financiers) get stuck on really critical problems. We have to learn about the industry, the country, the culture (of the company and beyond), the political setting in which the problem is occurring, etc. So we are constantly learning. We then apply our own methodology with them, sometimes educating them in the process, to collaboratively develop a strategy and help them execute. It does involve a lot of travel and hard work, but we have never had an employee at the consultant level leave because the work is so interesting (and the pay isn’t bad either). We do have one guy who just isn’t getting working out but that is a psychological issue.
As for 22 year olds, we don’t hire them. Unless they are brilliant, I don’t know what to do with them (we had one brilliant one who was able to make a contribution during a summer internship). Our consultants have MBAs, PhDs, MCPs, etc. But, we usually don’t hire them right out of school either.
Anyway, in what I see as the ultimate test, I think this work is so interesting, I don’t intend to retire because I can’t think of anything more interesting to do – the only thing I will do is reduce the number of clients I help, shift management responsibiliti