Honest Answers vs. Ones that Land You the Job. Back to all. Last Updated April, Liz Kenny. Many people choose a career in consulting because they are not sure about what they want to do. This is a great reason to be a consultant. You can learn and explore a lot while getting paid.
Your Name. Your Email. Send Me Access. You absolutely must love to solve difficult problems if you want to be a consultant. To Work With High-level Executives. If you get excited about exposure to senior leadership, consulting might be a great fit. As a consultant, you will interact with executives in formal and informal meetings.
You Want to Travel. A Lot. Everyone Else Is Doing It. If you want a job in consulting, you need to demonstrate how excited you are about consulting. A real nerd, not a comic book nerd. Find your version of this story. How do you geek out over some aspect of consulting? Tip 2: Make Your Answer Personal. What examples from your past life reflect how enthused you are about that aspect of the work. What can I do with my degree?
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View all business, consulting and management vacancies. Add to favourites. If you're motivated, enjoy problem solving and have an interest in helping organisations to operate better, then management consultancy is the career for you Management consultants help organisations to solve issues, create value, maximise growth and improve business performance.
Types of work can include: business strategy e-business financial and management controls human resources information technology marketing supply chain management. Responsibilities As a management consultant, you'll need to: carry out research and data collection to understand the organisation conduct analysis interview the client's employees, management team and other stakeholders run focus groups and facilitate workshops prepare business proposals and presentations identify issues and form hypotheses and solutions present findings and recommendations to clients implement recommendations or solutions and ensure the client receives the necessary assistance to carry it all out manage projects and programmes lead and manage those within the team, including analysts liaise with the client to keep them informed of progress and to make relevant decisions.
However, smaller consultancies may offer lower levels of pay and salaries do vary greatly depending on the location, type and size of consultancy. This is especially true if profit share and performance bonus schemes are available. After considerable experience, management consultants can work on a consultancy basis, charging a considerable day rate or project fee.
Income figures are intended as a guide only. Working hours Consultancy work can be demanding and involves long hours beyond 9am to 5pm, with extra work having to be carried out for large projects and to meet deadlines.
Freelance work is also possible, with substantial experience and good contacts. What to expect Consultancy involves a high level of responsibility and pressure. There can be some stress as there will be tough targets and tight deadlines to meet. Consultants can spend considerable time travelling between client sites in the UK. As they need to be based in clients' offices, considerable time away from home may be required if the site isn't local.
Work can be carried out on an international level, with many client organisations having offices overseas. This can provide opportunities for travel and work abroad. Skills and competencies. Fun, prospects or money: what are you looking for? Filling a coronavirus-shaped gap on your CV. Get inspired. You wouldn't use Comic Sans… or would you? Find answers to common questions about CV writing and pick up tips to make sure your CV meets the standards employers in the UK expect.
What are the top 10 skills that'll get you a job when you graduate? Have you got the key skills graduate employers look for? You'll need to give examples of these essential competencies in your job applications and interviews to impress recruiters and get hired. This traditional question can be asked in an interview across any profession or industry. Many clients have never thought about that. In any case, no outsider can supply useful findings unless he or she understands why the information is sought and how it will be used.
Consultants should also determine what relevant information is already on hand. Seemingly impertinent questions from both sides should not be cause for offense—they can be highly productive. Moreover, professionals have a responsibility to explore the underlying needs of their clients. Managers often give consultants difficult problems to solve.
For example, a client might wish to know whether to make or buy a component, acquire or divest a line of business, or change a marketing strategy. Or management may ask how to restructure the organization to be able to adapt more readily to change; which financial policies to adopt; or what the most practical solution is for a problem in compensation, morale, efficiency, internal communication, control, management succession, or whatever.
Seeking solutions to problems of this sort is certainly a legitimate function. But the consultant also has a professional responsibility to ask whether the problem as posed is what most needs solving. Very often the client needs help most in defining the real issue; indeed, some authorities argue that executives who can accurately determine the roots of their troubles do not need management consultants at all.
To do so, he or she might ask:. Suppose the problem is presented as low morale and poor performance in the hourly work force. The consultant who buys this definition on faith might spend a lot of time studying symptoms without ever uncovering causes. On the other hand, a consultant who too quickly rejects this way of describing the problem will end a potentially useful consulting process before it begins.
As the two parties work together, the problem may be redefined. Thus, a useful consulting process involves working with the problem as defined by the client in such a way that more useful definitions emerge naturally as the engagement proceeds.
Nevertheless, the process by which an accurate diagnosis is formed sometimes strains the consultant-client relationship, since managers are often fearful of uncovering difficult situations for which they might be blamed. Competent diagnosis requires more than an examination of the external environment, the technology and economics of the business, and the behavior of nonmanagerial members of the organization.
The consultant must also ask why executives made certain choices that now appear to be mistakes or ignored certain factors that now seem important. Although the need for independent diagnosis is often cited as a reason for using outsiders, drawing members of the client organization into the diagnostic process makes good sense.
They, not us, must do the detail work. While this is going on, we talk with the CEO every day for an hour or two about the issues that are surfacing, and we meet with the chairman once a week.
We get some sense of the skills of the key people—what they can do and how they work. When we emerge with strategic and organizational recommendations, they are usually well accepted because they have been thoroughly tested.
Top firms, therefore, establish such mechanisms as joint consultant-client task forces to work on data analysis and other parts of the diagnostic process.
As the process continues, managers naturally begin to implement corrective action without having to wait for formal recommendations. The engagement characteristically concludes with a written report or oral presentation that summarizes what the consultant has learned and that recommends in some detail what the client should do.
Firms devote a great deal of effort to designing their reports so that the information and analysis are clearly presented and the recommendations are convincingly related to the diagnosis on which they are based. Many people would probably say that the purpose of the engagement is fulfilled when the professional presents a consistent, logical action plan of steps designed to improve the diagnosed problem. The consultant recommends, and the client decides whether and how to implement. Though it may sound like a sensible division of labor, this setup is in many ways simplistic and unsatisfactory.
For example, a nationalized public utility in a developing country struggled for years to improve efficiency through tighter financial control of decentralized operations. According to the CEO, this advice ignored big stumbling blocks—civil service regulations, employment conditions, and relations with state and local governments. This sort of thing happens more often than management consultants like to admit, and not only in developing countries. In cases like these, each side blames the other.
And consultants frequently blame clients for not having enough sense to do what is obviously needed. Unfortunately, this thinking may lead the client to look for yet another candidate to play the game with one more time.
In the most successful relationships, there is not a rigid distinction between roles; formal recommendations should contain no surprises if the client helps develop them and the consultant is concerned with their implementation. A consultant will often ask for a second engagement to help install a recommended new system.
However, if the process to this point has not been collaborative, the client may reject a request to assist with implementation simply because it represents such a sudden shift in the nature of the relationship. Effective work on implementation problems requires a level of trust and cooperation that is developed gradually throughout the engagement.
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