Question about helpful learnings from being a consultant

The email below came to me from a reader who is currently an Analyst at a large management consulting firm. She has aspirations of pursuing an MBA (I learned that from a face-to-face conversation, not the email below) and is wondering what learnings gained from my time in consulting have been most useful to me now that I’m out of that game. This is a question that I’ve answered a couple of times on here, but in different ways than she asked in her message.

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VC wrote:

Hi Marquis,

What type of work did you do as consultant? Which do you think was more helpful: the actual skills you gained as a consultant or the ability to learn skills quickly for consultant projects?

Thanks,

VC

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My response:

VC,

Thanks for reaching out to me with your questions. I hope that my answers cover all of the bases that you had in mind.

When I was at McKinsey, I worked on projects in several industries, including travel logistics, asset management, education, and oil/gas, and across several functional areas, like post-merger integration, growth strategy, organizational transformation, and operational efficiency. In my last year there, I developed an affinity for Org work and likely would have focused in it as my platform if I had stayed at McK longer.

Your second question is a tough one because I can’t say that the actual skills learned was any more helpful than the ability to ramp up quickly for new projects and vice versa. Both sets of capabilities have been useful in my post-consulting career in different ways.

The core consultative skill set (including structured problem-solving, analytics, strategic communications, and people management/relations) is incredibly useful in a corporate environment, regardless of the industry and function that you’re working in. For example, being able to analyze and develop solutions for a given profitability problem can take a similar set of skills in the pharma industry as it does in the tech industry. Of course, knowledge of an industry and the associated organizational context are helpful, but former consultants tend to be able to pick those up pretty quickly. Furthermore, that skill set is rather distinctive once you get into a corporate environment, so having it can be a great way to distinguish yourself once your consulting days are over.

On your other point, the ability to hit the ground and ramp up quickly is absolutely huge once you transition out of consulting. In my experience, corporate projects/initiatives often rely on institutional knowledge and anyone who comes in cold without that knowledge runs the risk of getting lost and bring ineffective. As a consultant, one gains experience with asking the right questions and seeking out the right resources to learn what is needed much quicker than many other people. Also, a consultant’s ability to build trusted relationships with colleagues/clients can come in handy when one needs reliable points-of-contact to provide context and fill in information gaps on a given topic.

See what I mean when I say that it is difficult to say that one of these is more important than the other?

Hope this helps as you think about your career path after Accenture.

Marquis