Management consulting has two faces:
one shows off the advantages and the other tolerates the disadvantages. The opposite forces make the position both
gratifying and taxing. What makes
consultants smile and frown.
What makes
management consultants smile?
Below are the four best things about
being a management consultant.
Compensation
The promising five-digit compensation
has always attracted new recruits and kept incumbents in management consulting
industry. Fresh graduates who get hired
receive five-digit compensations, depending on the size of the firm, the
country and the assigned responsibilities. Apart from this amount, consultants
also receive allowances, insurance and other benefits. If you can get into management consultancy –
because it is also not so easy to get in – then you can always look forward to this
level of rewarding compensation.
Skills
Development
Management consulting
responsibilities sharpen consultants’ analytical,
organizational and communication skills. These valuable capabilities are basic
requirements of the position and are therefore utilized on a daily basis. As a natural result, the more often management
consultants use the skill, the better they get. Even if they leave the industry, they will
still be able to utilize what they’ve developed in their future job.
A most rewarding
Experience
A management consultants’
responsibilities can be summarized as helping organization improve efficiency
and corporate performance. For a
management consultant, the research, studies, market segmentation, competitor
analysis and all other efforts are focused on growth, which indirectly helps
thousands of employees. The targeted outcomes
of consultancy assignments give management consultants noble desires. Apart from this, consultants learn a lot
every day because the nature of their job is highly intellectual.
Wide
Network
Consultants are assigned to work for
different clients on different projects. Because of this, they can widen their network
with relatively little effort to reach out. The connections, if properly nurtured can lead
to more opportunities, more sources of information and lasting friendships.
Management consulting as a career has
disadvantages, too. What
makes management consultant frown?
Four of the most
evident are explained below.
Long
Hours
Because of the nature of their job,
management consultants work for long hours, about 60 to 80 hours per week.
Their time is consumed by writing client proposals and assignment reports, meetings
and presentations, interviews, team briefs, workshops, problem solving, focus group
discussions and responding to torrents of communication – all of which must be
done within frequently stringent and sometimes nearly unrealistic deadlines. Sometimes a management consultant, especially
as you move up the ladder, will be working on up to three unrelated
assignments, all of which will be making independent demands on his time. The anticipated outcomes on each assignment
that a management consultant is working on also give him independent
motivation, and a nudge to keep working until they are achieved.
This drives management consultants to
put in many long, extra working hours so that they can comply all the
requirements of the client on time. Consultants
are expected to deliver timely and quality outputs, and this is taken very
seriously.
Travel
One of the misconceptions
of management consulting life is the excitement of going on trips. At first, traveling can be very motivating but
as soon as consultants realize how much of their time is spent on the road, on planes,
trains, and in hotel rooms, they begin to miss the comfort and familiarity of
staying at home. Travelling becomes a
necessary but unpleasant requirement of a management consultant’s job.
Traveling can also be quire exhausting
since management consultants have to constantly adjust to the environment: the
temperature, the people, the food, etc.
At the end of a full working day, there will also frequently be evening
meetings to go to, clients to entertain, time sheets to fill in, reports to
write and preparation to do for the next day.
Still, the management consultant remains an important “visitor” to the
client and cannot therefore hope to hide away in the comfort of his cozy hotel
room
Further, and most importantly,
management consultants primarily travel to their destinations of travel to work,
and not for leisure. It is therefore not
uncommon for management consultants to travel to a beach resort city and only
see the sea from the plane on landing and takeoff. This can be very dragging.
Lack of
time for family and friends
Since management consultants spend a
lot of time working and traveling, they have no choice but to sacrifice the
time they are supposed to spend with their family and friends beyond
professional colleagues who they meet every day.
When they get home, it is possible
that everyone has had their dinner and the kids are already asleep, having done
their homework and played with whoever was available. Because of the demands of their job, missing
birthdays, reunions and other gatherings is a common incident for management
consultants.
To try and redeem the situation,
management consultants will sometimes carry work home, which only serves to
make the situation worse. The family
feels intruded, and the consultant is just not able to usefully divide his
attention. This can strain family
relationships.
Management consultants need optimum
discipline to manage their time.
Stress
Management consultants need to think critically
and logically. Because of the prolonged time
spent on analysis, reading, documentation and on face-to-face engagement with
clients, the heavy workload can cause severe stress.
On top of this, consultants also
frequently encounter complicated management and difficult employees at client
sites.
Management consultants also work on
strict deadlines, precisely because their work is cost and billed by the
hour. Assignment overruns are therefore
not only frowned upon by the client, but also by the management consultant’s
supervisor, directors and partners. It
is not funny.
Naturally the consulting team members
don’t necessarily always get along well because of various differences in
perspective and personalities, and because of pressure from the various roles
they each must play on the client’s assignment. Add the other situations above and you’ll
realize just how stressful working as a management consultant can be.
One might nonetheless say it is the
juggling of these high-adrenalin situations that management consultants are
faced with on a daily basis that makes management consultancy the extremely
rewarding experience it is the world over.