Strategy Consulting: What the Job Actually Is, Why People Choose It, and How to Get In

To explain what it means to work in consulting, you have to start with the business model. How does a consulting firm make money?

Picture this. You're a mid-sized or large company, maybe a very large one, Nike or McDonald's or IBM. And you have a problem.

Sometimes the problem is internal: launching a new product, restructuring the organisation, overhauling the marketing strategy. Sometimes it's external: a new competitor entering your market, a sector-wide crisis, new regulation you have to adapt to. Either way, the result is the same. A decision that's critical to the company's future has to be made.

Making that decision means taking on risk, responsibility and, if it all works out, credit. Credit tends not to get shared willingly. Risk and responsibility are another matter, and few executives want to carry all of it on their own shoulders.

That's the moment a consulting firm gets the call.

The firm is hired to lay out a set of strategic options and build a plan for tackling the decision or solving the problem. Importantly, it gets paid whether or not the client implements the recommendation, and whether or not the recommendation works. The work starts with an analysis of the situation, moves through developing a strategy or a solution, and ends with everything packaged into a deck of slides presented to the client, usually C-level executives who are free to do whatever they like with the material.

That's it.

Described that way, it's hard to see why consulting is treated as the promised land by so many business students. Nothing about it sounds revolutionary.

The job has more to it than that, though, and the rest of this piece is about what the reality actually looks like.

Why people choose consulting

Before getting into the day-to-day, the best firms to work for, the money and everything else, it's worth asking who the typical aspiring consultant is, and who should actually be aiming for this career.

We live in a world that offers a thousand options, and while that sounds like a good thing, it produces a particular kind of existential anxiety. We're afraid of making choices that lock in the direction of our lives. Afraid of discovering our real calling too late, when there's no going back. Or of realising that the thing we thought we wanted isn't for us after all.

So you pick a high school that keeps as many doors open as possible. Then you study economics, because it gives you the flexibility to work in any field and opens plenty more doors. And then you find yourself considering consulting, playing the same game with the same doors, driven by the same fear of committing.

Why does that matter? Because it's one of the main reasons ambitious business students end up in consulting: the luxury of postponing the decision about where your career is heading, and buying yourself more time to work out what you actually want to do.

In consulting you change project every couple of months. You work across different sectors and different kinds of problems. You learn an enormous amount, and the exit opportunities are close to endless.

All of that comes wrapped in a fairly glamorous lifestyle. Travel, hotels paid for every week, a long list of perks, a respectable salary, promotions every year or two, and a decent shot at getting an MBA at your dream business school paid for.

That already sounds more interesting than the version above. The point of this section is just that you understand why so many people pick this path. It's an excellent training ground at the start of a career, and it leaves the door open to a thousand different directions afterwards.

How a consulting firm is structured

Before describing a consultant's typical day, it helps to understand the roles you could hold inside a top firm.

Start with the standard split between front, middle and back office. The logic is the same as in banking. You're front office if you have direct client contact, back office if you have none, and middle office if your work directly supports front office roles, giving you indirect exposure to the client.

Consulting roles in the strict sense are all front office. But a firm that runs well needs the other two as well.

Back office means the firm's own marketing, finance and IT departments: the people who keep the consultancy itself functioning, rather than serving its clients.

Middle office means compliance, risk management and the various knowledge centres that support consultants in meeting client needs.

On the front office side, which is the part that matters here, job titles vary by firm, but the ladder usually looks like this:

• Intern (3–6 months)
• Business Analyst / Junior Consultant (2 years), sometimes with a senior year on top
• Associate (2 years)
• Manager (2 years), sometimes with a senior year on top
• Director / Principal / Associate Partner (promotion based on performance)
• Partner (promotion based on performance)
• Managing Director

The consulting lifestyle

Your days depend on your level. The rhythm of the job changes twice: once when you're promoted to manager, and again when you're promoted to partner.

From entry level up to manager, expect to start at 9am, align with your team, then work on your assigned project in groups of three to five consultants. The work is a mix of client calls, expert interviews, brainstorming sessions to generate possible solutions, data analysis in Excel to test hypotheses or build financial projections, and then packaging all of it into a PowerPoint deck to present to the client at the end of the project.

At the top firms, expect to work from the client's office much of the time, often abroad. That means flying out Monday morning and getting back to base camp on Thursday evening.

On hours: average 9am to 9 or 10pm Monday to Thursday, finishing around 7pm on Friday. At MBB, when a deadline is tight and especially on due diligence work, the nights get longer, wrapping up around midnight or 1am during the week. You're usually given a lighter week at the end of a project to recover.

Your company laptop (typically the ThinkPad from the "pls fix" memes) and work phone become your closest companions. You'll carry them everywhere, ready to take a call from a partner or make a last-minute edit. That constant low-level pressure, and the worry that the client will come back with something urgent outside office hours, is one of the real downsides of the job.

The pros

• You're never bored
• You work with young, exceptionally smart people from a wide range of backgrounds
• Career progression is fast, with a promotion every one to two years
• Firms often sponsor MBAs, covering up to 110% of tuition
• You learn a huge amount, especially early on
• You get to sample different industries and practices, which helps you work out what you actually enjoy
• The exit opportunities are excellent
• Above-average pay
• Strong perks on top of the salary: a daily meal allowance (up to €80 at MBB), paid taxis, health insurance and more

The cons

• Long hours
• Constant pressure, including outside the office
• Life organised around someone else's deadlines

Exit opportunities

After a few years in consulting you'll have a very broad skill set and comparatively little technical depth, unlike your friends in banking. There's a well-worn line about this: banking is knowing everything about nothing, consulting is knowing nothing about everything.

But after a few years at MBB, on soft skills you're a navy seal of productivity, organisation, communication, structured problem solving and, inevitably, PowerPoint.

You may not be seen as a specialist, but your skills transfer into a huge range of industries. That's exactly why the breadth of exit options is one of consulting's best perks.

The most common exits are a C-level role at a company in a sector you've worked in, founding a startup, or moving into venture capital. Private equity is rarer, but not off the table.

Earning potential

Consulting salaries don't come close to banking, but they're still good, and they scale into the millions at partner and managing director level.

Early on, base salary is the bulk of your compensation. As you climb, the bonus grows until it eventually overtakes the base, especially from associate partner upwards.

To give you a sense of scale, here are the gross salaries you can expect at MBB in Milan:

• Entry level: €40k
• Post-MBA: €80k
• Manager (plus a possible senior year): €120k
• Director / Principal / Associate Partner: €150k
• Partner: €350k+
• Managing Director: €500k+

The top firms

"Consulting firm" can describe almost any agency selling a service to external clients. Here we're focused on one specific type: strategy consulting.

The summit of strategy consulting is occupied by three firms, the most elite in the industry: McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bain & Company. Together they're known as MBB, after their initials.

MBB

• McKinsey
• BCG
• Bain

Just below MBB sit the Tier 2 firms. The work is much the same; the prestige is slightly lower. A stint in Tier 2 is an excellent springboard for applying to MBB later.

Tier 2

• Monitor Deloitte (Deloitte's strategy arm)
• Strategy& (PwC's strategy arm)
• EY-Parthenon (EY's strategy arm)
• Oliver Wyman
• OC&C
• L.E.K.
• Kearney (formerly A.T. Kearney)
• Roland Berger

The Big Four are the largest audit firms in the world. They split the market almost evenly between them, effectively operating as an oligopoly. These giants, some of which bill five times what MBB does, have expanded into advisory work, building consulting divisions organised by practice: supply chain, deals, operations, digital transformation and so on. Three of them have gone further and spun out a separate strategy business unit, which is why you'll find those names in the Tier 2 list above.

Big Four

• PwC Advisory
• Deloitte Consulting
• EY Advisory
• KPMG Advisory

On roughly the same level

• Accenture
• Capgemini

How to get into consulting

If you've read this far and decided strategy consulting is for you, here's the part that matters.

The first rule to keep in mind: in around 80% of cases, strategy consulting, and MBB in particular, happens in your home country. The job is intensely client-facing from the entry level up, which means you need the local language and a feel for the local business culture to manage the client relationship properly.

There are a few exceptions where English alone is enough, including MBB offices in Switzerland, Dubai, Sweden and Denmark. But competition from local candidates in those offices is fierce, and as an Italian applicant your odds improve considerably if you do a master's at a target university in that country.

With that out of the way, what kind of profile do these firms look for? Your academic background matters less than you'd think. Management, finance, engineering, it doesn't much matter. What counts is a very high GPA. In Italy, graduating with 110 e lode (the top mark, with distinction) is close to a hard requirement.

A competitive MBB CV generally has at least:

• Experience abroad
• A target university
• Top marks in both your bachelor's and your master's
• Volunteering experience
• Leadership experience
• Involvement in a student association
• English at C1 or above
• An internship in consulting or at a corporate

Tick all those boxes and you're in serious contention.

Most people apply toward the end of their master's, at least six months before the intended internship start date, then do a three or six-month internship and convert to full-time immediately afterwards.

The recruiting process

The standard process looks like this:

1. Online application
2. Online assessment (McKinsey's problem solving game, BCG's chatbot case, Bain's SOVA test)
3. HR interview plus case interviews

The HR interview covers personal fit and situational questions. The cases are simulated business problems you have to work through, usually lasting 30 to 40 minutes each.

For a sense of how MBB and Tier 2 cases are structured, look at Case in Point by Marc Cosentino, or work through practice cases on preplounge.com.

Summer internships

Summer internships have recently arrived in Italy too, and these programmes will consider undergraduates.

McKinsey runs the Fabienne Otto Summer Internship. Applications open in the autumn for an eight-week internship the following June and July. The intake is around five interns, and the process consists of an HR interview and a single case.

BCG runs a summer internship with applications in the spring of the same year, so you have more breathing room. Again, the process involves just one case.

Bain takes summer internship applications on a rolling basis, with placements usually running in June, July and September, with August off.

On pay: internships at MBB or Tier 2 in Milan pay somewhere around €800 to €1,000 a month depending on the firm. A full-time MBB role in Milan starts at roughly €40,000 gross a year.