🎯 Consulting

Progress Rundown
July 01, 2024

CONSULTING

Summary:

What is consulting? A graduate's guide to the consulting industry

Ever been interested in a career in consulting but not sure what it really entails? Let us help you out.

au.prosple.com/career-planning/what-is-consulting-a-graduates-guide-to-the-consulting-industry

Updates:

“ 2024 has been an extremely challenging time given continued layoffs at professional services firms. And the fact that consulting has been one of the preferred destinations for students of top graduate schools of business;* it has been challenging for them given cutbacks in hiring and or delayed start-dates.”

Dorie Clark, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out

Lay-offs:

You’ve probably heard of the massive lay-offs in the big 4 and other consulting firms that occurred due to the over-hiring procedures during the pandemic.

But consulting is not a one-shoe-fits-all type of industry, and the 9.6% outplacement of IT consultants can not exactly speak for the other branches.

To elaborate, we have The Management Consultant’s statement, who’s been in the consulting industry for over 20 years:

Even though things look tough right now, the consulting industry is likely to bounce back.

My prediction is that by Q4 ‘24 / Q1 ‘25, when we’ll likely have an interest rate cut, we will re-enter a state where economic expansion will drive consulting sales again.

I have been in consulting for the last couple of decades, and this is not the first time I'm seeing a soft time for the industry. I was there during 2008-2009 for the global financial crisis, and it wasn't pretty back then either.

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re in college, looking to get an entry in consulting, my advice is to go widen your pool of opportunities. Keep applying, and perhaps try tier-2 or tier-3 firms too. You can always repivot when the tide turns. Find small projects that you can use to acquire skills, and that can give you an edge over other applicants later on in the cycle: the internet is a fantastic place to hunt for such initiatives.

2. If you’re on the bench, be as visible as possible. Help with business development, call all your senior leaders and ask them how you could be of assistance in any role necessary. Spend time doing independent research and offer to help with thought leadership. Do not go in incognito mode and dissolve your presence. Keep the energy up. Companies will always struggle to get rid of top talent: make sure you are part of that elite.

3. If you’ve been laid off already, sh*t happens. Take however amount of time you need to decompress, but try your best to get back in the arena quickly. Leverage your relationships, explore opportunities online to start something on your own (this may be the nudge you were waiting for), be open to contracting roles. If you are keen to taking the plunge away, test exit opportunities in the industry. Or, well if you have a bit of an ego, just start a newsletter.

Global Outlook:

Mordor Intelligence Research & Advisory. (2024, May). Consulting Service Market Size & Share Analysis - Growth Trends & Forecasts (2024 - 2029). Mordor Intelligence. Retrieved July 1, 2024, from https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/consulting-service-market

CASE PREP

Casebooks (starting from 2017):

Wharton: https://careerinconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/6.-Wharton-Casebook-2017.pdf
The Fuqua School of Business (Duke): https://s3.amazonaws.com/thinkific/file_uploads/163260/attachments/f36/b23/9be/Fuqua_2018.pdf
Darden School of Business (UVA): https://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/files/Darden%20Case%20Book%202018-2019.pdf
Harvard Business School: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/files/hbs_older.pdf

Extra:

Michael Wong’s Q&A with Professor Frances Frei of the Harvard Business School:

Q: As several readers of this Q&A series are consultants who are parachuted in to support C-Suites’ transformation efforts, what three playbooks should they consider leveraging in their recommendations for transformation?

A: Infuse your recommendations with a focus on trust and speed. As was shared in a recent interview, there is a false narrative with the 'move fast and break things' philosophy of Facebook in that speed is portrayed in a negative light. As shared in my recent book, Move Fast and Fix Things, once trust is built, a team can move surprisingly fast; often faster than they thought. Here is the five-day playbook, which my co-author and I had originally wanted to timebox into hours, but our publisher pushed back. Hence, you have extra time to help deploy a blueprint for achieving speed the right way.

Monday: “Identify your real problem” by bringing curiosity to make sure that the team is solving the correct root problems, not just the symptoms. Toyota employees made famous their mantra of asking “Why” five times to make sure that a team had identified the core strategic pain points. And challenge oneself to see if the team is channeling limited resources towards the most urgent initiatives that can create large-scale quantifiable value, not just pilots.
Tuesday: “Solve for trust” by creating a good enough plan to engage with the stakeholders with an emphasis on building trust. The outcome is not a perfect plan but a way to engage and learn through others so that you can elevate your thinking.
Wednesday: “Make new friends” by securing peripheral vision through widening the aperture to gain ideas on the plan that you created on Tuesday. Adding others’ additional dimensions can help make your good enough plan an even better plan.
Thursday: “Tell a good story” by including the past, present, and future aspects so that they can help elevate stakeholders’ commitment to the plan. In particular, honor those practices of the past which will provide value to the future; and explain the reasons for change of those processes that no longer will be part of the upcoming transformation journey.
Friday: “Go as Fast as you can” as the earlier steps have enabled you to minimize and or avoid some of the damages which have occurred if you had not taken the previous four strategies.

_**Credits:_{PharmExec.com}