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Question from an Executive MBA student looking to transition to Management Consulting

by | Aug 18, 2013 | career, consulting, mba, professional advice, Telecom | 0 comments

The email below was sent to me by an Engineer at AT&T who is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at a school just outside of Atlanta, GA. She is interested in moving into Management Consulting once she finishes her MBA and wants my advice on how to think about this transition.

Unfortunately, this is one of the emails that sat in my Inbox for a long time and I’m sad to say that it took me over a year to get back to the sender. I have no idea if my words will be helpful, but I thought it would be better to send a reply than to simply delete the email.

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RS wrote:

Hello Marquis,

I am [RS]. This is regarding an advise in regards to the transition into Management Consulting from Computer Networks. I hold a Masters in telecom and currently pursing my Exec MBA from Kennesaw State Univ. I work for ATT as an Engineer and am 26 years old. I am into my second semester of my MBA program and am realizing that Management Consulting is where i want to be in. I tried to look around for opportunities and how to approach this transition and during this process came across your blog. Can you please advise me on this ?

Thanks Much!
RS

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My response:

Hi RS,

Thanks for reaching out to me with your question. I apologize for taking so long to respond, but, as you can imagine, I receive a lot of emails and, with my busy schedule, I tend to take a while to get back to folks. I hope this message gets to you in time to be helpful to you.

By now, I think you might be close to finishing up your Executive MBA, so I’d like to congratulate you on that. I can attest that Management Consulting is a great place for freshly-minted MBAs to develop their business skills while using their newly-developed business acumen to help organizations improve.

I must start by saying that this email may not be as detailed as you’re hoping for because your question is one that I’ve answered on my blog many times before. Over the years, I’ve been contacted by several people with technical/telecom backgrounds who, like you, aspire to transition into Management Consulting, so, in the interest of being efficient with time, I would recommend that you read through my archived blog entries to check out the detailed advice that I gave to those people.

For now, I can share a few high-level comments to give you a starting point for thinking about your transition:

  • Kennesaw State’s MBA program is likely not a core recruiting school for Management Consulting firms, so you should prepare yourself to have a more self-directed recruiting process. You should use KSU’s Career Services Office as much as you can for advice and information, but they may not have job postings that will be direct leads to the jobs that you want. Don’t let that deter you. Be creative to get inroads in the companies that interest you through tactics like looking for KSU alums working in the organizations and attending local networking events.

  • You likely have some great deep industry/technical expertise in Telecom and Networking Technology from your work at AT&T…use that as the foundation for your candidacy for a position at a Consulting firm. For firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG that offer both strategy and hands-on IT/implementation consulting services, your industry background could be especially interesting. Make sure that you figure out how to best tell your story to make the firms understand how you can add value to their clients.

  • Don’t rule out the possibility of staying with AT&T and using your new business skills to move up within that organization. It may be possible for you to transition from an Engineer role into one that is more on the business side of the house, possibly in strategy or business development. That way, you’d be able to leverage your current knowledge of the organization and relationships to create a new career path for yourself in a familiar work environment. I’ve found that it is much easier to move to new roles within an organization where you’ve already proven yourself and have some credibility than to make a jump over to a whole new company.
I’m not sure if this email is helpful since it has been so long since you originally emailed me, but I wanted to get back to you anyway. I apologize again for the delay.

Marquis