New in-depth profile on management consulting

By · Published May 11th, 2015

We’ve released a major update to our career profile on management consulting.

See the updated profile here.

See the new in-depth report upon which it’s based here.

Overall, our recommendation is similar to before:

Consulting is a promising path, offering good career capital that keeps your options open and high earnings. However, it’s highly competitive and we have a limited understanding of its potential for direct impact.

Consider a job in consulting if you have strong academic credentials, aren’t sure about your long-term plans and want to experience work in a variety of business environments, don’t have a high-impact alternative immediately available, or you want to earn to give but are not a good fit for quantitative trading or technology entrepreneurship.

But we’ve gone much more in-depth into:

  • The chances of becoming a partner, arguing that about 10% make it but it requires a great deal of dedication.
  • Common exit options, showing that consultants enter a very wide range of fields when they leave.
  • What proportion of people who want to become consultants actually make it.
  • The potential for direct impact, arguing it’s worse than other common alternatives.

This is our first ‘medium-depth’ career profile, and we hope it will act as a template for further work.

Thank you to Nick Beckstead for carrying out the research.