Monday, October 4, 2010

Mckinsey, BCG, Bain and co

When I was at business school, many of my fellow students were interested in pursuing a career with one of the big generalist brands. I was one of them and I attended several recruitment events at which McKinsey, Bain and co visited our campus.
The first thing I realised was that the people working for these firms are not the 'Masters of Universe' their websites want to make us believe! At one event, for instance a range of consultancies had sent people to give recruitment speeches. We were all looking forward to hearing what they had to say and were particularly exited in anticipation of the McKinsey presentation.
The McKinsey guy however gave a mediocre presentation at best. Things he said about the McKinsey career path ran contrary to his own career path he had described before and overall he was not such a great presenter. We all felt that a legend had fallen.
Regardless of that I am convinced that the people at McKinsey are excellent at what they do and that McKinsey is one of the best consultancies in the world. However, they are also just human beings.
Finally I would like to give some advice when applying to these big names in consulting:
Take a good look at your CV, in my experience what they care about most are top grades at all stages of your education, including high school. If your performance was not outstanding at every institution you visited, or you have studied at an ivy league type of university, don't bother applying. Second thing they look for is work experience. I you haven't completed an internship with a big consultancy (assuming you are applying for an entrance level/analyst position) things might be very difficult as well.
All the other stuff they mention at their websites, diversity, languages, studies abroad. Good if you got that covered, but in my experience not as important as the other aspects.

2 comments:

  1. How important do you think is it to actually have an MBA? Is it absolutely essential? Or can work experience actually beat that?

    Barry

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  2. Well I think that MBAs are overrated (unless you got one from one of the few top schools). My latest post comments on that. In my opinion an MBA is only useful if you haven't studied business before. I have a bachelor in Business for instance, so I had a look at MBA curriculums and figured that it's pretty similar to what I did before. If I remember correctly MBA degrees were once designed to equip people with non-business backgrounds, such as engineers, with business skills. Unfortunately it has now turned in the standard business school postgraduate degree.

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