Professionals who lack a strong work ethic or who can't maintain long hours don't usually succeed in consulting. In consulting, you'll work with a lot of data and facts, and you'll have to make a lot of decisions. Not everyone will be the right ones. Becoming a great consultant means that sometimes you make an error in judgment, and that's okay.
If you screw up, don't beat yourself up and don't try to correct the mistake yourself. Look for experienced resources, such as your mentor or boss, to understand where you went wrong and how you can fix it. Consulting is the most popular career path for MBA students, and consulting jobs are extremely competitive. This means that there are a lot of hard-working people competing for very prestigious jobs.
The biggest problem is that most candidates try very hard to get a job they know next to nothing about. Can you imagine applying for a job when you don't really know what that job is? How would you formulate your answers for the interview? The first objective of the book is to give students a practical understanding of what work is. So yes, in consulting, you're more likely to work fewer hours than in investment banking. However, weeks of 70 to 80 hours spread over five days still translate into days of 14 to 16 hours.
Plus, there's almost no downtime in consulting, meaning you'll rarely be able to take a 30-minute coffee break, make important calls, or go to the drugstore to buy the deodorant you need. Being constantly away from home means you'll have to pack in almost all of your private “tasks” over the weekend. You're surrounded by some of the brightest and most motivated people in any profession. Consulting is a highly sought after career option and involves one of the most difficult hiring processes in the business world.
It requires that a certain type of person with specific personality traits not only receive an offer, but also to succeed at work. There is often a joke that consultants simply speak abstractly or move numbers in Excel. He believes that the consulting world is driven by customer demands and not by employee experience. As a consultant, the impact you have is mainly indirect through the advice you provide to your clients.
However, another consultant reports: “I am not the type of person who is interested in the topic of the couple. The fact that around 26% of consultants are self-employed increases the impact of the success or failure of each project. This knowledge not only comes for project work, but also for the different training that can be obtained in any consulting company. Consulting is a client-oriented role, so it's important to have good interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.
It also defines that it is very stressful to work on a project where the consultant has no experience. As Martin Elwert, consultant at Roland Berger, says, “you are surrounded by people who are looking for above average results. Some of the core skills you need to succeed as a consultant are analytical skills, comfort with ambiguity, skills with people, discipline, and organization. Joining a consulting firm is one of the most effective and surely fastest ways to build a vast and valuable network, and it will allow you to build multiple relationships across multiple organizations.
If you're considering applying to top consulting firms, such as McKinsey, BCG, or Bain, you've probably wondered if you're the type of person who would thrive in consulting. A consultant from Amsterdam, a multicultural city and capital of the Netherlands, reports that in the company where he works, institutionalized racial prejudice is very common in the fields of consulting, management and marketing. The leap to consulting looks great on the resume, and the experience and skills developed in that profession can't be earned anywhere else. When I was a consultant, I went to networking events at universities and was rounded up by candidates who asked the wrong questions and made themselves look bad.
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