The Five Ways Working as a Management Consultant Will Level Up Your Career

And how to get the same benefits even if you don’t work as a management consultant

Reflecting on my life as a management consultant, I wanted to highlight some of the benefits of being a ‘snake in a suit’ — it’s a way for others to understand what it’s like working for a professional services firm, but also for me to carve the lessons learned into my brain and to identify how to apply it to my overall career.

For context, I worked for two of the big 4 firms: EY and Deloitte — spending about 7 years at the two firms and working my way up from consultant to manager. Although most of my projects were local, I had a few projects that brought me to different places in Canada.

A wide breadth of projects

One benefit is the breadth of projects you work on. At the lower levels (analyst, consultant, and to a certain extent senior consultant), you work on different types of projects. One project might be developing an IT Strategy for an Oil and Gas client. Another project might be developing a business case for a Public Sector client’s data centre. Yet another project could be supporting change management for a major ERP transformation for a Banking client. As you might have noticed, I’m focused on Technology but in general, if our clients wanted our support and they were willing to pay, we would do the work.

The great thing about working on a breadth of projects is understanding what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’re good at (and not so good at). You might have an idea of what you want to do for work coming out of university, but the reality is quite different.

Working with different teams

Subsequently, when you’re working on a wide breadth of projects, the team is slightly different each time because each project requires a specific set of strengths and expertise. You could be working with a senior consultant and then directly with a Partner on one project, and then working with multiple consultants, a manager, and a senior manager on another project.

When you work on that many project teams, you learn about how you work with others. Do you cover for others when they have fallen behind? Are you strong in technical analysis? Working with and visualizing data? Conducting presentations?

Some of the best project teams I have worked with had a manager or senior manager consider the strengths of each member and organize the project in a way to play to each of our strengths.

Accelerated masterclass on customer service

Every project the firm works on is for a paying customer. The customer is paying us for products or services. But the interesting thing about working for a firm is that you actually have a few ‘customers’. One is the customer who is paying for your work (the client). Another customer is the Partner who manages the relationship with the client and makes sure that the work is delivered to the client’s satisfaction. Yet another customer is your direct supervisor (usually your manager or senior manager). Each ‘customer’ wants different things and your work as a management consultant is a balancing act to make sure certain balls stay on and other balls fall off.

Although in general, if you make the client happy, you make everyone else happy, that might not always be the case and you have to recognize those situations.

It’s a direct contrast to when you are working on projects at a private or public sector company — your clients are internal which makes it (usually) less stressful and complex.

Understanding what it means to create quality deliverables

Before I worked at the firm, I had no idea what it meant to create quality deliverables. I thought it was about putting words onto a document, but it is so much more than that. Here’s a sample checklist of things I would review in a deliverable:

• Spelling and grammar
• MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) — have I covered all angles and perspectives
• Stakeholder input — have I shown this to others and have they been able to provide input on this
• Formatting — do things look ‘good’
• Images and tables — do all images and tables have labels
• Table of contents — right numbers and headings
• Headers and footers — display properly
• Page numbers — inside footers
• Double spaces

Just reading through the checklist brings back memories. My sense of what ‘quality’ looks like changed after my time at the firm — changed for the better.

Travel on the company’s dime

If you’re young and you want to see the world, working as a management consultant might be for you. Now you might not always get to choose where you get to work, but you certainly get to travel to different cities on the company’s dime. Early in my career, we had some work in Singapore which meant that one of us consultants could work and travel there. It was a sweet gig but one which I was a bit hesitant to do because I liked the stability of not travelling. A part of me looks back and wishes I had raised my hand because travelling is such a luxury these days, especially with COVID.

And there are other benefits to travelling on the company’s dime: building loyalty points, spending money to get rewards on your credit card, meeting new team members, building global relationships with clients, and spending significantly less money at home.

How you can use the above five lessons, even if you’re not a management consultant

Just because you’re not a management consultant and don’t plan on becoming one soon doesn’t mean you can’t use my lessons.

• If you’re early in your career, raise your hand and work on as many different projects as you can. Yes, you’re going to be slightly overworked raising your hand and saying yes to too many things, but as Scott Galloway says, balance in your later career is a result of being tremendously unbalanced early in your career (i.e., working as hard as you can until your 30s or 40s). Even if you’re not early in your career if you don’t like what you are currently doing, going wide on projects is a great way to find something you do like and want to devote your career in.
• One great way of learning how to work in different teams is to work on many different types of projects. This doesn’t necessarily have to be work projects like at a firm — this can be volunteering to be the coach for your daughter’s basketball team or finding areas within your organization that need support and you can donate your time, or finding causes outside of work. That’s also a good way to find other non-work projects to work on if you don’t have the option of choosing what or how many projects to work on at work.
• I learned a great variety of skills when it came to managing clients: communication, managing expectations, negotiation, influence, listening, and understanding the bigger picture. All of these skills were tremendously useful after leaving management consulting. But if you don’t work in that kind of environment, what can you do? You can look for opportunities to do customer service roles within your organization. Say there’s a conference or an event and someone from your organization has to man the booth. Or suppose there are some customer-facing roles within your organization. Volunteer. Tell them you want to help. The worst they can say is no.
• Every partner, senior manager and manager had different quality standards. But all of them had a minimum level you needed to reach. But suppose you work for a boss that doesn’t have any quality standards — one way I would try to improve my quality is to pass the deliverable to others in the organization that are known to be a bit crazy or extreme in their quality. Or if there’s a peer or mentor within your organization you respect, you can pass it to them and ask them for feedback on what to improve. Quality standards were met at the firm through a trial by fire — in other words, you quickly learned how to meet the quality standards or you were out of a job.
• Travel is an interesting subject — some people love it and others hate it. But one thing my work as a management consultant taught me is to not shy away from travelling, even if it’s to somewhere you may not have heard of or want to necessarily travel to for vacation. When you’re young and without commitments, it’s great to see the world. In my current role, and now with COVID, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to travel — but the way I would approach it if I wanted to travel more is to find conferences or events that are relevant to the work I’m doing and the organization I work for. Travel isn’t just about you, you have to ask what’s in it for the company I work for. Offer to conduct a presentation of what you have learned to the company. Offer to build and manage a key relationship with an international customer. Make damn sure that the company gets value from your travel.