Question from a medical student considering Consulting as a career

The email below came in from a reader who is currently in medical school and is considering joining McKinsey & Company after graduation. His question is about job security as a Consultant and whether he’d be making a risky move by passing up a surefire career in medicine to learn about business in Management Consulting.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to respond to this reader’s email, so I might have sent it to him too late to be helpful in his thinking around the decision. I hope that isn’t the case though.

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DN wrote:

Hi,

I am a medical student in the UK and am considering going to work for McKinsey straight after medical school.

I was just wondering what the job security was like as that is my biggest worry. I heard its ‘up or out’ which is a bit scary considering I’m currently guaranteed a job for life.

Many thanks,

DN

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My response:

DN,

I hope this message finds you doing well. I should start by apologizing for taking so long to reply to your email. As you can imagine, I get a lot of emails and it often takes me a few months to see a particular person’s message, which is what happened in your case. You didn’t indicate how far along you are in medical school, so I’m hoping that you get this message in time for it to be useful to you.

The job security in the Management Consulting industry is a valid concern, but, in practice, I wouldn’t say that it is something about which one should lose sleep. Across the industry, the average tenure for a Consultant after grad school is about 2 years. There are several reasons for such a short tenure, including lifestyle preferences, desire to move into an industry/operating role, and the proverbial “offer that one can’t refuse”. Also, you would be amazed at how much one can learn in only a single 3-4 month long project. If you were to get a few of those under your belt, you’d have a great collection of business know-how and employers in both the private and public sector recognize that fact.

That said, in most Consulting firms, there is indeed an “up or out” kind of system, but I wouldn’t say that you should necessarily be “scared” about because there are a wealth of post-Consulting exit options, which, in your case, could include a return to the practice of medicine. I don’t think that spending a few years as a Management Consultant would preclude you from ever being able to practice medicine in the future. In other words, you’d still have your “job for life”.

In addition to thinking about the job security of a role in Consulting, I would encourage you to do some research into the potential career paths that could follow a stint as a Consultant, especially for someone with a medical background. I have several friends from my time at McKinsey who had MD degrees that, after leaving The Firm, they went in several different amazing directions. Several of them took jobs at Pharma companies, where their medical backgrounds and business acumen were tremendous value-adds. Others took operating positions at hospitals and hospital management groups with huge upward trajectories. In one case, a guy launched his own Management Consulting firm focused on advising small- and medium-sized bio-tech companies. So, even if you wouldn’t go back to a medical practice after being a Consultant, you would have no trouble finding a job afterward.

By the way, I’ve received a few emails in the past from people who were either in medical or were in the middle of their post-med school rotations with similar questions about Management Consulting. I turned my responses to those emails into blog entries, which can be found in the archives on my website. Please feel free to scan through those old blog postings for additional insights.

Take care and good luck with the remainder of your medical school studies.

Marquis