The writer is in an engineering role in the Automotive industry and wants to pursue an MBA before moving into management consulting. His question to me was about whether he should get work experience in a different industry before applying to business school to improve his chances on both fronts.
Check out the text below to see how I advised him on this…
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AK wrote:
Hello,I liked your blog entries very much. I am Ankit working as a Sales and Support Engineer for Industrial Automation products for past 2 years. I am planning to get into a management consultancy and therefore planning to get into a B-School.While I am preparing for my application I got a question in my mind. What role does pre MBA career play for getting into any consultancy? Shall I gain more experience of different industries to get a taste of different industrial arenas or I should comply with my current Industry?
Best Regards,
AK
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My response:
AK,
I hope this message finds you well.
I know that this email may seem random (and you may not even recognize my name), but you emailed me a couple of years ago with questions about applying to business school. I receive many, many emails from people seeking information on a range of topics and, unfortunately, your email fell through the cracks over time. I’ve recently started the process of going through my Inbox to respond to emails that have been there for a while and I found yours. I’m really sorry that it took me so long to get back to you and hope that the information below may still be of some use to you.
So, let’s dive right into your question. As I look at your email, I see a pair of separate issues:
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- What role does pre-MBA career play in getting into a consulting firm?
The answer here isn’t a quick one, but I’ll try my best to unpack it as well as I can.
At a high-level, there are certain pre-MBA career tracks that are seen as a more direct route into a post-MBA gig with a Consulting firm, but that isn’t a hard and fast rule. People who worked in Consulting or Investment Banking before business school are highly desired by Consulting firms because of the highly analytical nature of that work and the intense work environments. It is thought that people who have those experiences earlier on would be able to hit the ground faster after business school, so firms tend to target them during the MBA on-campus recruiting process. Corporate Finance and internal strategy folks are often looked at in the same way.
While consulting firms tend to like people with pre-MBA experience in certain industries, that doesn’t mean that people who worked in other industries are totally out of luck. I have met people who ended up at the Big 3 firms and other large consulting players after having worked as teachers, doctors, engineers, etc prior to pursuing an MBA. I’d argue that being able to demonstrate leadership and impact in one’s pre-MBA career followed by strong performance in the interview process can be a great equalizer for folks who weren’t Consultants or Investment Bankers before business school. I believe that because I’ve lived it. 🙂
Also, if you aspire to join a consulting firm that focuses on a particular industry (i.e., a specialized boutique firm), having pre-MBA experience in a particular niche can be very helpful. This isn’t exactly a surefire thing though because, by virtue of being smaller in size, boutique firms don’t often do on-campus hiring and tend to focus on recruiting people with some post-MBA experience in their industry/function/segment of interest. As such, it’ll likely be more difficult for a newly-minted MBA graduate to get into one of these firms.
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- Should you gain more work experience across different industries or stay in your current one?
At first, I had a hard time figuring out how to respond to this question because I wasn’t sure whether you were asking it through the lens of trying to get into business school or into a consulting firm. My answer in both cases is similar, but the reasons are different. For the answer below, I’m going to assume that you were asking for the purposes of getting a MBA.
One of the key admissions inputs for business school is an applicant’s work experience and several factors are considered when evaluating one’s experience, including industry, role(s), advancement, and leadership potential. I mention this here because it is much easier to rate highly on this scale if you stay within a single industry or functional area. While it is possible to jump around to different roles before B-school and still be admitted to a strong program, I’d argue that it is much more difficult.
When starting any new role, a person will face a learning curve that will have to be conquered before he/she can start having impact. As such, it is easier to drive performance and impact if the learning curve is less steep. A great way to ensure a manageable learning curve is to work within a familiar industry or function, which allows for an easier work transition and offers the opportunity to focus on management/leadership opportunities.
In other words, staying in your industry would probably give you the best chance to excel in your pre-MBA career and help you to become a better candidate for a top MBA program, which would be helpful in pursuing a post-MBA role in management consulting. Make sense?
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That’s about all that I have on your questions, so I hope that my words are helpful. I apologize again for taking so long to respond to your email.
Take care and, if you haven’t applied to business school yet, I hope that you find the above information to be helpful in your information gathering.
Marquis
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