What do employers look for in consulting?

No matter how many frameworks, reference sheets, or strategy models you have up your sleeve, good consulting always comes down to analytical skills. What matters is whether you can effectively deconstruct and classify information, identify new correlations, and draw conclusions from all of this. Strategic thinking is a unique combination of a conceptual understanding of a business situation and an understanding of its practical applications.

Consultants

must have an extraordinary perspective at all levels of strategy, from the most abstract and visionary ideas to everyday things as usual.

Management consultants typically work with clients for short periods of time before moving on to a new client or even a new industry. And they are expected to quickly catch up with the customer's business. The process of moving from one customer to another and tackling new problems will only appeal to you if you consider yourself intellectually curious or curious and enjoy the learning process.

Management consulting

firms are looking for tangible examples of their personal and professional experiences in which they took risks navigating the “unknown” and successfully embarked on uncharted territory.

Your superior academic performance, especially if it includes a diverse and multidisciplinary course, would also give you credibility in demonstrating your intellectual curiosity. In 1993, Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson concluded that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice activate latent genes that lead to physical and cognitive adaptation and, therefore, are the key to exceptional achievement. Business awareness is an understanding of how economic factors affect companies and the sectors in which they work. Consultants need this skill to be able to create solutions that take into account economic problems.

Research the company, the sectors in which it specializes, its recent projects and its competitors.

Combine this with keeping up to date with what's happening in the economic and political world in general, as these events will affect consulting clients.

. You can draw on your business knowledge when participating in case study interviews with consulting firms or when answering typical consulting interview questions, such as “What do you know about us?” and “What is the biggest challenge that our company (or our customers) will face in the next three years?” Learn more about what commercial knowledge means in practice and how to acquire it. Demonstrate your organizational skills by providing evidence of a time when you juggled work, study, and extracurricular activities.

Be prepared to discuss this in more detail in an interview and practice your answers in advance. What tactics did you use to manage your time? What was effective for you and why? Join more than 19,000 consultants and keep up to date with our top consultant resources. When you're working on a consulting project, you'll want to be flexible. You can agree on a schedule weeks or months in advance, thinking that it is etched in stone.

But things happen; your customer's needs change, so you'll want to be prepared. Join more than 150,000 business and human resource leaders and keep up to date with our key resources. Nobody is going to tell you how to conduct a consultation session or what your next steps should be, so this profession requires an entrepreneurial spirit, especially if you are working as an independent consultant on your own. Human resources consultants focus on an organization's processes that revolve around employees and team culture.

Management consulting firms also consider your performance on standardized tests, such as the GMAT, and often request your scores on standardized tests as part of their job application processes...