What exactly is "management consulting"? And how is it that students can become management consultants? To find out, we dug around the web and asked a few management consultants for their thoughts.
✨"Management consulting" defined
🔍 What do management consultants do?
🤔How come students can become consultants?
🆚What's the difference between strategy & management consulting?
💵How much do entry-level consultants earn?
🔀Exit options
🚀Where can I find internships?
Let's break it down.
When you consult someone, you ask them for their expert advice. For example, you might consult with a doctor to get health advice. Or you might consult a career counselor for advice on getting an internship.
Well, businesses need advice too! In the business world, when a company needs help with a challenge, they might ask an expert from outside the company. This is called consulting.
There are many types of consulting, depending on what kind of help is needed. For example, if a company needs help with engineering problems, they might use "engineering consulting."
Here, we're focusing on something called management consulting.
"Management" refers to the work of managing a business – i.e. its resources, processes, technologies, and people – to help it succeed.
Management consulting is the practice of helping businesses become more efficient, more profitable, and more effective at reaching their goals.
But how do consultants help companies achieve this?
In broad strokes, management consultants follow the following three steps to help businesses out.
To get a more concrete idea of what consultants do, hear from a real consultant:
The first part of the consulting process is also the most important one – that's when we assess the current state of the client.
For example, if the client needs help with managing employee performance, we might request a list of employees along with samples of performance reviews. We'll analyze the data and conduct interviews to get an idea of what problems the client is facing. The end result of this is a report that summarizes their findings.
When that's done, we report our findings to the client. If they don't feel like we've done a good job of looking into their problem, they might hire another consulting firm – just like how you might go to another doctor to get a second opinion on a health problem if you feel your first doctor might have misdiagnosed you. So it's actually possible for us to lose a client at this point!
Anyways, assuming they're happy with our work, we'll continue working together. We'll set a timeline for the rest of the project, and we'll spend a couple weeks coming up with recommendations.
Oftentimes, we'll work "on-site" or at their office. This is good for us as we get a chance to work more closely with them. The more you involve them in the process, the more they'll like what you propose and the less likely they'll be like "What is this? We didn't discuss this" when you give them suggestions.
The end result of this stage is a report on what approach we want to take to solve their problem. Once everyone agrees to that, we officially launch the project, following the approach we set out.
You might wonder how someone fresh out of college can work as a consultant. For example, doctors have to go through years and years of education, training, and certification before they even become "junior" doctors. What explains how a student can become a consultant "just like that"?
The main reason is that businesses hire consultants primarily for their ability to think deeply about problems. So a consultant doesn't need to be an expert in a specific field, but they need to be an expert in solve problems – and this is a skill that students (like you!) can be trained to do very well.
Often the biggest problem a business has isn't that they're bereft of smart people. It's just hard for people to find time to think of the bigger-picture problems. They also may not have the resources or are so in the trenches that it's hard for them to see the problem or solution clearly.
That's where consultants can help. They have problem-solving know-how and are trained to understand businesses quickly, which allows them to see things from an objective perspective.
So even if you're fresh out of college, you become trained in how to think and problem-solve so you can walk into any industry or company and know how to ask the right questions to get to the results.
You're also taught to develop hypothesis-driven problem-solving approaches. So you're kind of like a scientist. You come up with a hypothesis that you prove or disprove by looking at the data, the interviews, or any other analysis you do.
– Former strategy consultant
There any management consultants who are industry experts – i.e. they worked many years in a certain industry before becoming a consultant. But that won't be the case for most consultants.
Some consultants will become something of an expert in a specific field if they've worked for a long time and have gone deep into a particular industry. For example, a partner who understands, say, the retail sector really well because most of their projects were in that sector.
But generally, a consultant should be able to work flexibly for any industry because you're trained as a generalist. You're trained to think, problem-solve, analyze, communicate, and how to quickly understand any industry. Consulting is industry-agnostic.
– Former strategy consultant
The next reason students can become consultants is because helping a business solve its problems requires a lot of "leg work." Junior consultants may not be involved in coming up with solutions for a client, but they'll be involved with all the work that leads to that.
Lead consultants are often spread across multiple projects so junior consultants do the grunt work.
– Former strategy consultant
This means you'd work on research, data analysis, preparing presentations, and other foundational tasks that contribute to the development of strategies and solutions. Your work would allows more senior consultants to focus on higher-level strategy and client engagement, leveraging their expertise where it's most needed.
The third reason a student can become a consultant is because of the excellent training programs consulting firms offer.
Consulting firms provide structured programs and internships that are specifically designed to equip recent graduates with the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience to become effective consultants. They understand that while students may not have extensive work experience, their fresh perspectives, eagerness to learn, and ability to adapt can be just as valuable.
When you start, they literally take you as a baby and they try to make you into a consultant. They will send you everywhere for training, they will give you opportunities, they will give you events to meet other people.
– Consultant formerly @ PwC
To learn more about what junior-level management consultants do, check out Big 4 junior consultants share what their work is really like.
You'll often hear "management consulting" and "strategy consulting" used together. Some consultants will even use them interchangeably!
That said, conventionally, strategy consulting is seen as a type of management consulting.
Strategy consultants help senior executives determine the overall direction in which they will take the business. ... Examples of strategy work include:
- What should be our long-term vision?
- Should we retain the same portfolio of businesses?
- Should we enter this market?
- Do we have a competitive advantage?
- What is the best way for us to extract value from our SUV division?
Some firms specialize in strategy consulting – the most famous ones being McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. Firms like the Big 4 (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC) focus more on the other types of consulting – sometimes known as the "implementation" consulting.
Implementation consulting is totally different from operations and strategy consulting. ... Let’s assume Bain advised an airline to set up a new low-cost airline division. The strategy calculated that doing this would lead to the airline saving $100 million over 3 years.
The implementation consultants need to determine the pieces of activity required to take all the existing employees within the airline, create a new division, brand it, set up the operating structures, and move the employees to the new division. They need to also get involved in asset management, performance improvement, and customer relationship management where they develop strategies to enhance customer experience and ultimately improve customer satisfaction.
Strategy and implementation aren't two totally separate things though. For example, even if you work in HR consulting, you might be helping clients with their HR strategies. You just might not be involved only in the high-level planning stages but also in the nitty-gritty of making those strategies work in the real world.
And at the junior level, even if you work at a strategy-focused firm, you'll likely work on both strategy and non-strategy projects.
To learn more about strategy consulting, check out What in the world is strategy consulting? A guide for students.
Do management consultants make six-figure salaries? How much do entry-level consultants make? Find out in From intern to partner: Consulting salary & career progression explained.
What can you do after consulting? The answer is "A lot" – that's why many students try to start their careers in this field!
The typical path that people see in consulting is you work at a big consulting firm for two years, and then you go off and do whatever else it is you want to do, whether it’s go work at a startup, or you want to go in-house at a large organization and be on the client-side. So there’s that path where you kind of get that experience, you work with a lot of different companies, and then you move on to something else.
You can also work for a few years at a firm, then go get your MBA and come back to work at that firm. And that way the firm is paying for your MBA. And then you’re also going to see people who just stay for years and years at their consulting firm and progress up that ladder.
If you're still shopping for opportunities, check out all our consulting internships!