how to get a job in consulting – free course
The consulting recruiting process is competitive and challenging. Luckily, there are myriad resources to help you with every step of the process. Unfortunately, the best resources for each topic are scattered across many sites, YouTube videos and blog posts.
To help candidates navigate the complex world of consulting recruiting, we created a syllabus to use from the moment you suspect consulting may be a good career, through case prep and even the day of your interview.
For many topics, we provide proprietary content written by experts with deep expertise in recruiting at firms like BCG and McKinsey. However for other topics, we’ve scoured the internet to provide the best links whether it be from us or another site.
If you’re new, click on the preliminary research tab and get started!
| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Join school consulting club | If you’re in school, join the consulting club – right now. They will have a ton of resources and events to get you on track | |
| Research consulting industry | Be able to succintly describe what is consulting: Research what exactly it is, top companies, their services, types of people, | |
| Understand why you | Build out your thesis for why you are interested in consulting and how your skills and experience would be a great fit |
| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Track upcoming consulting event schedule | For on-campus recruiting, consulting firms have a defined schedule for when they will have presentations, events & case competitions. Get these on your calendar ASAP | |
| Download our networking tracking tool & add connections who may have a link to consulting | We created a worksheet for candidates to use to track the networking process. Download the sheet and begin writing down potential people for you to reach out to. You want to create a networking list of people you can reach out to. To do this, you’ll want to start with people you know: friends, family, family friends, friends of friends, etc. Let those close to you know you’re looking to learn more about the consulting industry (not looking for a job yet) | |
| Leverage 2nd, 3rd order connections | Reach out to people on LinkedIn who have mutual friends or even went to your alma mater. Remember, do not ask someone for a job, you are only learning more about the job. However, it is ok to see if people on the other end are willing to put in contact with someone else you can speak to and learn from | |
| Go to all consulting club events | Sign up for coffee chats, case competitions, cocktail hours, etc — these are great opportunities to get to know people involved in the recruiting process |
| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Take an audit of all of your previous jobs, projects & skills | You’re going to want to make a clear case for why you are a good fit with consulting using your resume — make sure you can access all of the building blocks | |
| Build your draft resume | Use formatting guidelines from either your consulting club, career services, other sources like Consulting Confidant | |
| Iterate and perfect | Your resume will take a number of revisions. Constantly improve by having more experienced people review it. The more familiar someone is with consulting recruiting, the better | |
| Cover letter | Luckily, you’ve done a ton of networking and know why you want to work for each specific firm you are applying to, why your skills match the job and why you’re a good cultural fit Your cover letter is your opportunity to briefly outline this connection | |
| Submit resume & cover letter! | Know the process. If you need to apply through the school website and through the company website — do it. These processes are not always perfectly streamlined, so follow instructions. This is an easy one, don’t fumble it. |
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| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| (Optional) Read seminal business strategy books | Dive into business strategy and operations. Read the WSJ, BusinessWeek. Read influencial texts like Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage and/or Understanding Michael Porter, The McKinsey Mind, Minto Pyramid Principle, | Reading list coming soon |
| Understanding the basics | Learn what is a case, why it’s important, why consultancies use it in the interview process | |
| Build your foundation of the consulting mindset | Consultants utilize a very structured problem solving skillset that will be exercised during the interview. Get to know key consulting skills such as drivers, MECE, 80/20 | |
| Learn and practice frameworks | Frameworks are crucial for success in the case. Understand the basics, why this is important and incorporate it into your general problem solving approach as early as possible | |
| Develop a foundation of key business concepts | You should have an understanding of how a business functions. This will help greatly with your hypothesis generation and moving through the case. Some key things to understand are: value chains, unit economics and reading a simplified income statement, fixed vs variable costs, pricing strategies, distribution models, customer segmentation, competitive advantage and industry structure | |
| Take your quant skills to the next level | Consultants are data driven. To be data driven, you must be comfortable putting down your calculator and accurately performing ‘back of the envelop’ calculations. Many of us haven’t done long division in quite a while. This is something that you will need to practice. Further, you will need to become very familiar with common equations used in cases like performing break-even analyses, calculating ROI, manipulating weighted averages and understanding basic income statement ratios.
Former McKinsey consultant Matthew Tambiah created a fantastic online course called FastMath Ace the Case that is designed specifically to teach the quant skills needed to succeed in case interviews. The course teaches fast and efficient mental calculation methods and how to apply them to the most common types of case interview quant problems such as break-even analysis, market sizing and estimation, and profitability analysis. |
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| Start practicing cases! | Think of cases more like a sport. Unfortunately you cannot just read a book and then expect to make it to the NBA. You will need to practice, practice, practice! Find people to do practice cases with! While it’s best to do it with people familiar with consulting & case interviews, doing it with your roommate is better than nothing. As you do practice cases, try to focus on 1-2 key skills to master – as noted in the following points | |
| Master the art of being hypothesis driven | A key part of the consulting problem solving tool kit is being ‘hypothesis driven.’ They don’thave time to ‘boil the ocean’ by looking through all possible avenues – they come up with a falsifiable hypothesis that if data supports or disproves, they will be closer to getting to an answer. Throughout the case, you will be exercising this mindset | |
| Use a note taking strategy | Come up with and practice a strategy to take & organize notes | |
| Communicate like a consultant | Consultants know that time is at a massive premium. When they communicate, the are concise, clear and structured. Practice this communication style during your case because you can bet that the person on the other side of the table will constantly be asking herself, “Would I feel comfortable putting this person in front of a client?” | |
| Finish like a champ | At the end of every case, you will need to summarize your findings. To conclude like a consultant, you must learn to be answer first, use data from the case to back up your recommendation and show that you’ve thought through some of the second order implications | |
| Become a master chart reader | Remember when we said consultants are data-driven? Not only do they need to use data to perform analysis, they also need to share both internally and with the client. Chart creation and understanding are critical skills for a consultant. Become familiar with chart types such a stacked bar graphs, waterfalls, mari-mekkos, bubble charts, line graphs, spider charts, gantt charts and some of the sneaky ways they can be made more complicated. And the by the way, you are no longer friends with pie graphs… | |
| Fill in the gaps | You should have a good sense of where you need more practice and where you are awesome. Make sure that you continue to develop your strengths and definitely shore up your weaknesses. Further, you should make sure you’ve performed all of the major case types: Profitability, M&A, Pricing, Growth strategy, Operations, Logistics/Supply chain, cost cutting, investment decision & some weird ones. If you haven’t done one of these cases, definitely seek it out! You don’t want you interview to be the first time you see a particular type of case. | |
| Finishing touches | OK, you’ve done 15-20+ cases and are in the swing of things. Now it’s time to put some of those finishing touches on your performance like, taking impeccable notes that can sometimes double as a slide, incorporating outside knowledge into the case without impacting the flow, etc. If you’re already given an interview, many firms will let you do a mock case with a consultant. If you don’t have this luxury, you can do a live case with a service such as Consulting Confidant to perform a case with a consulting alumni to test your performance and get feedback on those finishing touches |
| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Take an audit of your experiences | Similar to when you did this for your resume, you now need to do this once again, but start thinking about more of details: who was involved, what were you thinking, why did you do what you did?, what happened, why did that happen? | Coming soon |
| Review the most common fit questions | Understand and categorize the most common fit questions | |
| ‘Tag’ & categorize your experiences | Tag your experiences along simple dimensions such as successes, failures, leadership, analytics, influence, proactivity, ‘grit’ & categorize them based upon where they took place — academic, job, role, etc | Coming soon |
| Build a map of your experiences | Now that you’ve tagged and categorized your stories, put them on a map so that you can quickly identify the point of different stories and the context. It’s OK if this isn’t MECE | Coming soon |
| Create a mental map of your stories | When you have a story, you should have milestones along the way. You’re not going to memorize these stories verbatim, but you will have a clear path that covers the context, what decision/challenge you faced, why you chose what you did, what happened and what you learned | Coming soon |
| Master the ‘Walk me through your resume’ | Get this question down! You will be asked this multiple times in the interview | |
| Practice in front of a mirror, on camera, with friends, with consultants | Practice your stories as answers to specific questions in a concise & clear, story. Make sure you’re getting your points across and the listener is getting a better sense for how you are as a person |
| Module | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Relax the day before | Make sure you are well rested the night before. | |
| Come prepared and rock your interview! | You’ve worked very hard over the past few months. No need to worry, you’ve prepared and all should be awesome |