Last Updated on February 22, 2024
Embarking on a journey in the consulting industry can be both exhilarating and daunting, especially for those just starting out at McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. The path to success is paved with challenges that demand a unique set of skills and a proactive mindset.
Extracted and modified from the comprehensive book “Consulting Career Secrets,” this article unveils the essential tasks that entry-level consultants must master to thrive in their firms from day one. From conducting in-depth research and analysis to developing strategic recommendations, we delve into the core responsibilities that form the foundation of a successful consulting career.
Whether you’re a recent graduate or transitioning to consulting from another sector, this article provides valuable insights into navigating your new role effectively. Once you understand why companies hire management consulting firms, you need to figure out how you can add value as a junior consultant.
Jumping Into Cold Water
Contrary to popular opinion, entry-level consultants are not relegated to mundane tasks. Consulting firms expect you to integrate quickly, constantly increasing your duties and responsibilities. While a grace period for development is allowed, you should be fully operational and managing your work independently within a few weeks. “Your work” refers to the tasks delegated to you, whether new work packages or ongoing tasks from a colleague transitioning out of the engagement.
The expectations from everyone on the team are that you are responsible for the content of your specific workstream and possess the most profound knowledge and insight in this area. You are expected to maintain working-level client relationships. Project managers and partners consult you for information and advice on issues that may reach the CEO’s desk from the very beginning.
For example, I vividly recall the pressure I felt when, just two weeks into my first engagement, the partner called upon me to help prepare for an impromptu meeting with the CEO. He said, “Help me understand this better. What should we do? What do you recommend and why?” Talk about quick integration and impact expectations.
Expectations for and Tasks of Junior Consultants
As a new hire, you contribute by helping the team formulate and test hypotheses to answer the client’s questions and reach the project’s objectives. Although the content of your work may vary depending on the client, project scope, and duration, there are generally four main tasks you perform iteratively on a daily or weekly basis.
Your role requires gathering data, designing and conducting qualitative and quantitative analyses, interpreting and visualizing the results, and presenting your findings. Initially, you complete most of these four tasks in close collaboration with senior consultants or your project manager.
For example, your project manager may discuss which analyses would yield the most impactful insights, and then have you collect the data and create the initial analysis draft. They might also demonstrate the best way to visualize your findings on paper and ask you to replicate it in PowerPoint. Over the next few weeks, you will gain more responsibility and autonomy in managing your work packages until you become a fully independent consultant.
Let us look at the four tasks in more detail:
Data Collection for Consultants
The foundation of analysis. Once you have determined the necessary analysis to answer the questions in a project context, you may devote much of your time to gathering and collecting relevant qualitative or quantitative data. You can source data from client interviews, field research, employee discussions, surveys, client databases, internal firm databases, knowledge networks, in-house experts, or external data sources, such as news outlets, magazines, industry reports, research, or competitors’ financial statements.
Collecting the appropriate data in the correct format can be time-consuming and challenging, often involving issues such as unresponsive clients or inadequate or inaccurate data. Optimal data may not always be available, and there could be delays in obtaining it. Multiple data pulls and iterations may be needed to refine the data. An essential step in the process is cleaning the data to prepare it for analysis.
As a junior consultant, you must quickly determine how to acquire the right data for your analyses, make assumptions to bridge gaps, and triangulate data using different qualitative and quantitative data sources. The type of data you collect depends on the analysis you intend to conduct. Identifying the precise data needed, the optimal format, and the appropriate sources for collecting it is crucial, and you should develop an understanding of what level of detail is necessary for various analyses. Some require accurate and granular data; others can be addressed with quick, rough calculations.
Your firm’s support staff may be able to assist with data collection. Specific data, reports, and expert interviews can be costly; hence, you need to consider their use carefully.
Practical example: Suppose you are working with a cargo airline on a project to reduce fuel consumption. One potential strategy your team is considering is removing all paint layers from the aircraft, leaving only the protective coating (a method previously employed by some cargo airlines). To assess the impact of this measure, you must structure your analysis and collect several data points:
- Weight savings per aircraft for one coat of paint
- Fuel savings per kg of reduced weight per flight hour
- Average yearly flight hours per aircraft
- Aviation fuel price
- Number of aircraft in the fleet
Not all data will come from the same source. For example, while you can obtain the average daily flight hours from the client’s flight operations team, the weight savings for a coat of paint for a specific aircraft type may require contacting external experts, reviewing industry reports, or contacting aircraft manufacturers and painting companies.
Data Analysis for Consultants
Transforming information into insights. Once you have received all data, cleaned and formatted it, you can proceed with the analysis to test the team’s hypotheses. During data analysis, it is essential to maintain a clear objective to avoid the risk of “boiling the ocean,” a term consultants use indicating to get lost in irrelevant details, which results in useless analyses and outcomes, wasting precious time and resources.
Simple quantitative data analysis can be performed using tools such as Excel or Alteryx. Larger or more complex datasets often require the expertise of dedicated support departments within the firm, which utilize advanced software or provide programming support to develop custom tools. Qualitative data (e.g., expert opinions) often support quantitative findings, clarify the logic behind the results, or identify implications that can be derived from them. The more data is available, the more robust and persuasive your findings and recommendations will be.
As an analyst, you will take the lead in managing the data analysis process. Data analysis often involves periodic problem-solving sessions to review intermediate approaches and results and define further analysis. You may need to develop assumptions that are discussed and aligned with the team, client, and occasionally other experts. Typical outcomes may include financial forecasts, market predictions, business cases, operational improvements, and pricing adjustments.
Major analytical tasks are typically divided among team members.
Practical example: Continuing with our previous example, assume you have analyzed the potential multi-million annual fuel and cost savings for the entire aircraft fleet. Upon reviewing your findings with your team and in-house experts, you discover two key insights. First, completely removing paint would lead to corrosion issues over time, even with the protective layer intact. Second, the fuel price assumption you used was based on an average from the past few years, but fuel prices are expected to rise over the next five years. Consequently, you adjust your analytical model by reducing the weight savings, adding an extra protective paint layer, and creating multiple savings scenarios based on different fuel price projections.
Creating Presentations as a Consultant
Visualizing results to go from analysis to impactful communication. Once your analysis is complete, you must effectively visualize the results, typically in the form of one or several impactful PowerPoint slides. Early in your career, your project manager may provide you with a template slide to populate with data. However, as you progress, you will develop complete slide decks from start to finish, incorporating a cohesive storyline. You will quickly learn the most effective chart and word choices to convey specific messages and emphasize key insights and implications. Additionally, top firms often employ slide specialists to assist with drafting, refining, or polishing slide production and final deliverables overnight.
At this stage, a common pitfall for junior consultants is failing to contextualize their results, for instance, by delving into Excel models and analytical drivers instead of discussing recommendations derived from the analytical outcomes. I vividly recall confidently presenting an analysis to one of the partners early in my first engagement. To my astonishment, the partner appeared less than impressed with my work, and I sensed that my presentation raised more questions than it provided answers. Upon completing my presentation, the partner commended my effort but inquired about the crucial “so-what?”
Clients and partners expect actionable recommendations, not just a series of data analyses and number crunching. As a junior consultant, you must contextualize your analyses and derive actionable insights. Your results must be simplified to make them easily digestible and comprehensible for the intended audience.
Practical example: You create an output slide based on your refined analysis to visualize your recommendation to eliminate the paint layers that are not required to achieve significant fuel and cost savings. Your slide adheres to slide writing and design best practices, incorporates the “so-what?” and supports your message with robust data. The slide addresses the client inquiries and paves the way for achieving the project’s objectives.
Presenting Insights as a Consultant
Getting your message across. You will frequently attend client meetings to present and discuss analyses, results, implications, and next steps. Depending on the nature of the meeting and your experience level, you may have the opportunity to present your work to senior client leaders, sometimes within your first few weeks on the job. Meetings with middle managers and working-level clients are often led autonomously by relatively junior business analysts and associates. These meetings provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your work, build client relationships, navigate political constraints, and gather senior clients’ perspectives. Meetings also allow you to test your recommendations and learn about additional requirements and interdependencies.
Your deliverables are reviewed in client meetings, leading to the specification of new deliverables or new objectives to be addressed by the following important client meeting.
Practical example: Initially, you use your output slide to discuss with your team and working-level clients, guiding them through your thought process and approach. They may provide input that prompts adjustments to your analysis and slide. Once the slide has undergone enough iterations and received your team’s leadership approval, it is included in a C-level update meeting, where you may receive further input (e.g., “the CEO likes the idea but wants to maintain the airline’s colored tail for marketing purposes”). Based on this feedback, you revise your model and consider the interdependencies (reducing weight savings from the tail), create a new output, update the slide, and ultimately incorporate it into the engagement’s final deliverable as a key fuel-saving recommendation.
This example illustrates the iterative nature of consulting work. In practice, you will manage larger workstreams and concurrently handle multiple such analyses.
Multiple slide decks may be circulated within the team room simultaneously. These documents include individual decks for specific workstreams, working-level client discussions, bi-weekly C-level meeting updates, and a consolidated deck representing the final deliverable. The latter is often the first item created by the team, featuring a draft storyline and template slides that guide the analyses. The deck is populated throughout the engagement with data, analyses, and recommendations.
As slide decks often serve as a project’s primary deliverable and basis for C-level discussions, numerous iterations can be expected before completion. It is not uncommon for a document intended for a final C-level meeting to reach version 40 or higher.
It is important to get up to speed quickly with these tasks, add-value to your teams and clients quickly, and avoid the major mistakes that junior consultants often make, while also working on your resilience and work-life balance.
Dealing with Culture Shock and Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is a common challenge many new consultants face in this environment, often creating a culture shock upon joining a firm.
It is not unusual to feel that everyone around you, even those with just a few months more experience, appears more competent, confident, and knowledgeable. They seem to complete tasks much faster and cope with their workload better, leaving you feeling overwhelmed. I recall my first day on my first team when a relatively simple analysis took me longer than expected while the rest of the team was done with their work. They offered to help multiple times, but I wanted to finish independently. That evening, I felt somewhat lost.
Fear not, for the steep learning curve over the next few weeks and months will help you rapidly become the confident professional you admired during your first days. It is entirely normal to feel that the job might be too challenging during your initial weeks, but rest assured, it will quickly improve. The accelerated learning curve in consulting enables you to gain knowledge and experience in one year, typically taking three to five years in other career paths. Consequently, a recurring theme in a consultant’s career is the constant immersion in new projects, tasks, and unfamiliar territories.
Initially, you may feel uncertain and apprehensive about addressing a challenge or completing a task within the allotted time. However, the key takeaway is that you will ultimately always discover a way to navigate these situations effectively. It always works out in the end. Embracing a growth mindset, building on your strengths, and leveraging the resources and network provided by your firm are essential elements for success in these situations.
In the meantime, remember that everyone goes through similar feelings, and you are not alone in this journey. In the professional landscape, particularly within accelerated career paths such as consulting, individuals continuously adapt and learn as they progress. You will be amazed at how far you have come a year from now by following the advice that follows in the book.
