Why Consulting?

Either way, you need to work out whether and how management consulting matches up to your own skills, temperament and goals.

The answer here will and should be different for everyone – and this isn’t just some platitude about how we’re all special and unique. As we’ll see, you will need to be able to give a very specific, personal answer to “why consulting?” if you want to stand a chance of impressing your interviewers.

Why does it matter?

Consulting is tough and – if your heart isn’t in it – you will just be miserable and end up bailing out after a few months.

In fact, the average “lifespan” of a new consultant is typically a little under two years before they leave the profession (or are let go). When you consider that there are plenty of staff staying on for 10+ years, this means a hefty number of new recruits are leaving within 12 months.

Firms are all too aware of this. Turnover of staff is a major problem for top consultancies, who see teams disrupted and – crucially – lose recruits before the firm has recouped the investment made to train them.

An eternal problem for top firms in particular is newer consultants bailing out just as they become experienced enough to be really useful - as this is also the point at which they start to have lucrative exit opportunities by taking that useful experience to other industries.

In short then, understanding precisely why you want to enter the profession is not just about making sure you are happy (though that’s clearly important). Consulting firms have a major financial interest in making sure you stick around long enough to become a profitable asset.

As such, the onus is on you, the applicant, to demonstrate beyond doubt that this will be the case for you. This starts during networking and is an important aspect of your cover letter , but comes into its own during interview.

Tackling the issue like a consultant...

Like any good consultant dealing with a problem, you should approach the question of “why consulting?” itself by making a rigorous appraisal of all available options.

In making your assessment, it is important to note that even applying to consulting and taking the selection process seriously is a significant commitment. Landing a job will subsequently mean years of your life spent working long hours in the profession.

In short, when you opt to pursue consulting, it is a very real investment and should be treated as such. In this spirit, then, we need to not only consider the pros and cons of consulting in itself, but also the opportunity costs. Could the same benefits be obtained elsewhere? What do you miss out on by opting for a career in consulting as opposed to another industry?

Just as when considering an investment in a business context, the final answer here also depends on the specific investor. That is, the reason as to why you personally should (or should not) enter consulting is going to depend upon your own individual goals and characteristics.

Much as we would love to, we can’t give a one-size-fits-all answer for all readers. What we can do, though, is help you analyse the various factors you need to weigh to make your own decision – or to construct your own rationale for the purposes of cover letters and interview answers.

Thus, we will take a transect of some of the most common reasons and take a look at both sides of the rationale for each.

Only some are the kind of thing you will be able to emphasise in interviews but all are factors you need to give real consideration.

Salary

Let’s be realistic and start with what everyone was thinking. Management consulting is well-known for paying very high salaries and this is doubtless at least one reason all candidates have in mind when they make their applications.

Certainly, these figures are right at the top end of what you can expect to earn with the relevant degrees.

However…

Now, it’s not quite so simple.

When asked “why consulting?” in an interview, you clearly can’t just answer “the money”. However, it is important to realise that this is not only because it would be an incredibly crass answer to give.

Salary alone is simply not a sufficient reason to go into consulting. Regardless of what you say in interview, if the pay packet really is your only reason to want to enter the profession, it shows your decision was the result of a pretty poor analysis.

This is may be a bold claim. Let’s drill down a little to explain in more detail:

You can make the same elsewhere

Just wanting to maximise your paycheque isn’t really a sufficient reason to go into consulting as opposed to another profession.

For instance, if you are a strong enough candidate to land a job at McKinsey, Bain or BCG, then chances are you could have landed a job at Goldman-Sachs, Deutsche, Barclays or any number of roles in finance, which might pay the same or even more.

To differentiate between these options, you need to consider variables other than salary. Even if you think that you are in it only for the money, there must have been additional factors which attract you to, or make you better suited for, consulting rather than an equally well remunerated career elsewhere.

And, of course, for the purposes of your interview, these other factors are the ones which you should be able to clearly state and explain!

Balancing Salary Against Lifestyle/Conditions

Another way of thinking about consulting salaries as a reason to enter the profession is effectively considering the hourly rate which you would be earning.

As with many other high-paid jobs, at least at the more junior rungs on the ladder, when you divide your expected salary by the number of hours worked, your resulting hourly rate might not be much better than someone with a much lower annual salary in a profession with shorter hours.

When you are simply trading time for money, you inevitably arrive at the maximisation problem as to exactly how much time you want to trade.

Putting in more hours for a higher salary might not always be optimal in terms of maximising your own happiness or corresponding to your other life goals. To put it more simply, might you actually be happier in a job where you worked half the hours for half the pay? What about three quarters of the hours for 75% of the pay?

This brings us neatly to our next major factor to consider, which heavily elides with any serious consideration of consulting salary.

Lifestyle

The particular lifestyle associated with consulting can easily be considered a pro or a con depending on your own personal preferences.

Other than the high salary, perhaps the other thing everyone knows about consulting is the combination of grueling hours and a huge amount of travel – both domestic and international – which is entailed.

The hours are perhaps simply something to be tolerated, unless you are particularly hyper-industrious and love the work.

However, the travel can be both a strong positive and deal-breaking negative. Consider the following:

Rapid Development

Now, with all the grinding hours and stress that comes with consulting, the result is a rate of personal development pretty much unmatched in other industries.

A banker might spend years pushing relatively trivial numbers around spreadsheets before they are trusted with much genuine responsibility. In consulting, though, you will be taking responsibility for important components of projects and presenting findings to high-level clients right from the get-go.

To do so, you will need to pick up a broad skill set very quickly. Whilst this will be taxing, the result is a rate of development unparalleled in pretty well any other profession.

Preparation for Leadership (AKA The Buttigieg Effect)

By now, it is somewhat cliché to cite the hugely disproportionate number of Fortune 500 CEOs, political leaders etc who are all “alumni” of the top consulting firms.

Some portion of this phenomenon will be related to the rapid personal development discussed above. Firms will have taken the wet clay of keen young minds and moulded it into something powerful and effective.

However, a more deflationary account is that consulting firms are really just good at recruiting the best talent, so they are finding people who were going to be successful anyway. In effect, they have become adept at briefly sequestering the best and brightest on a career path which was always going to lead to great things.

In reality, though the truth is (as usual) somewhere in between. The skillset you gain from consulting will likely be useful in helping you move on to bigger and better things. But, if you are good enough to make it to the top in the first place, you can probably do so via multiple different routes.

Brand

One result of this association with high flying “alumni”, along with the general reputation for excellence of the big consulting firms, is the sheer brand power which comes with having worked there.

For many purposes, having McKinsey or another MBB on your resume is pretty much equivalent to an Ivy League or Oxbridge university – more so in the right context (especially as attending the likes of Harvard or Cambridge is no guarantee at all of an MBB job).

In just the same way as having gotten into a top university, having landed a job an MBB or other elite consulting firm shows that you were good enough to make it through an incredibly tough selection process.

Perhaps more importantly for potential employers, though, having experience somewhere like McKinsey, Bain or BCG will clearly signal that you have acquired genuinely useful, practical skills which they can make use of in their own businesses. Even aside from practical benefit, a future employer might simply leverage your brand to impress clients

Finally, outside the workplace, just as with a top university, there will be a certain intangible pride from having been at one of these top companies. Some applicants will simply want to work for an MBB firm because they are the best and because they are so hard to get into.

With all that said, of course, there are firms in other industries just as prestigious.

Exit Opportunities

Now, the one you really can’t mention in interview.

A significant reason many applicants are attracted to consulting is not consulting itself, but the fact that, for all the reasons around rapid skill development, leadership preparation and personal brand mentioned above, there are plenty of excellent exit opportunities  - either in terms of simply landing lucrative positions elsewhere or in terms of opening the door for opportunities which might have been inaccessible otherwise.

This might be especially salient for experienced professionals who have already spent a few years in one industry and who might use a short spell in consulting either to leverage themselves up the ladder when they return or to pivot into something else.

The advantage here is real and a strategic stint in consulting as part of a wider career is an eminently sensible idea for many individuals.

However, consulting firms also know precisely how this whole strategy works. As we mentioned at the start of this article, it is a particularly vexing way for firms to lose staff – just when a consultant has accrued the experience required to start being a truly profitable asset.

This is a key reason why experienced hires with good careers in other industries and generally any applicant coming in from an idiosyncratic background is going to be given a grilling

Interviewers are going to be doing their best to weed out “opportunists” only intent on building credentials for another industry.

Therefore, whilst we can’t recommend lying, try to avoid talking about consulting as a stepping stone to other careers. If you have any thoughts about potentially sticking around in the longer term, this is the portion of your thinking to channel during selection.

Preparing for “why consulting?” questions properly

“Why Consulting?” is really just one instance of a “culture fit” or simply “fit” interview question. For much more detail here, you can see our dedicated article on consulting fit interviews .

You might be given a stand-alone fit interview. However, even if an interview session is explicitly billed as a case interview, you can almost invariably expect a substantial fit portion. That is, even where an interview is billed as a case session, you are still likely to be asked fit questions like “why consulting?” at some point.

To make matters worse, applicants often neglect the importance of fit questions, underpreparing or even just “winging” them on the day. The assumption is that fit questions are simply “fluff” and that only the cases matter. However – as we have seen – firms really do care about your answers for good financial reasons!

To help you out here, MyConsultingCoach has been the first to develop a structured, comprehensive fit interview course to help you be fully prepared for selection.

Getting ready for consulting interviews as a whole!

Depending on the particular firm, office and role you are applying to, you will have to make it through various different configurations of case and fit interview.

Whatever the case may be, you need to be ready to ace both case and fit questions if you want to land a job at a top consulting firm.

If you're new to case interviews, then you should start by reading our introduction to case interviews and our article on the fit interview. These pieces will not only explain the challenges you face, but also point you towards the tools you need to face them.

Specifically, you will be pointed towards our excellent free resources including our extensive case library and our meeting board, where you can practice those cases with fellow applicants.

The best place to learn to crack cases and deliver convincing fit interviews will always be our MCC Academy course - a comprehensive, structured set of full-length, high quality, animated video lessons, along with exercises and tests. In particular, this course teaches you how to crack cases using the same processes as a real consultant, via our Problem Driven Structure approach.

For those who want to step things up and work with seasoned MBB consultants in their prep, our coaching and mentoring programs give you the best possible chance of landing your dream job!

With all these resources at your disposal, then, the only thing that remains is for you to get started on your prep!