re: Yay

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I figured you would be posting here. Did you switch out of consulting and start working for a Fortune 500 type of firm?

I always wondered what the consultants did if they didn’t stick around and work their way up the company ladder. I think general management jobs are fading away and mostly reserved for the leadership development programs.

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Generally, the exit opportunities are either to a current client or a larger firm. The job is very dependent on the experience as a 'consultant'. Some firms specialize in placing people into strategy roles, while others are great at landing FP&A or Supply Chain gigs. It really depends on the experience someone has at the firm and how well s/he can tell a story of how that experience is relevant in industry.

There are some very clear exit paths out of consulting. Every firm calls the levels in a slightly difference nomenclature but this is the gist of it:

-Analyst/Associate: Entry level from undergrad.
-Consultant/Senior Associate: Get promoted here after 2-3 years at Associate. This is the entry point for post-MBA
-Manager/Engagement Manager: Promoted here at the 5 year mark if straight from undergrad or 2-3 years if post-MBA. Heavy client delivery with slow sales targets.
-Director: Generally 8-9 year mark, job starts shifting to business development with some client delivery.
-Managing Director: ~10-12 years, non-equity partners. Heavy selling, client oversight; minimal day-to-day project management
-Partner: ~12-15 years; equity stake in firm; Heavy selling, client oversight; minimal day-to-day project management

Speed up the ladder in later years built on ability to sell and manage client relationships. The early years are mainly about your ability to build models / crunch large data sets (typically in Excel) and build clean, well-designed PowerPoints. As you move up the ladder, you become more of the thought-leader that is quality control and designing the type of work completed by A/SA team members.

The benefits of consulting are you get paid fairly well (especially at higher levels or post-MBA), see a wide variety of business topics, can work in a broad number of industries, and get executive-level exposure very early in your career. You learn a lot of frameworks and ways to analyze business problems, sharpen your analytical capabilities, and learn to tell stories that are digestible for senior-level folks. You also work with a relatively young workforce that is driven and highly intelligent. On the flip side, the negatives are you work a lot of hours, have demanding clients and colleagues, travel frequently, and spend your days hunched over a laptop cranking out PPT slides. You don't "own" anything because you are temporary labor and your role is to influence those that do have ownership authority.

The vast majority of people leave at the Consultant or Manager level, typically within 6 months to a year of the promotion.

If someone stays past Manager/EM, then the opportunities to jump into industry become much more difficult. Director level is earning really good money in consulting and would require ~VP level in industry to stay comparable (still would likely be a pay cut). The problem is two-fold in that there are limited VP roles available and the job responsibilities do not always translate easily with the experience at the Director level. By this point in the consulting career path, someone is becoming a consulting 'lifer' ....at least until the Partner level. I have seen Partners who will jump over to industry at the C-Suite level.

One piece of advice: Saying you want to be "a consultant" is like saying "I want a job" because it holds little meaning. You need to figure out the type of consulting you want to do. Strategy, supply chain, financial management, change management, sales, marketing, digital, risk, IT strategy, IT implementations, etc...the list goes on for functional responsibilities. Or, do you want to be a generalist? Aligned to an industry? Each firm is structured differently and this can greatly impact your experience at the firm.

The people I saw flame out the quickest were the ones that got hired into the wrong group or staffed on projects in a group outside of their own. If someone is hired to do supply chain strategy consulting and then ends up on an 18-month CRM implementation, then that is a recipe for an unhappy employee.

All of this to say, you need to be specific in the firms you target and the role you are pursuing. Otherwise, especially at the big firms, you can get eaten up by the machine and have a less than desirable experience. Hope this helps and good luck