It seems like people do really well for themselves after they leave McKinsey, do you think this is mostly a function of the cache having McKinsey on your resume brings? What skills are really developed as a management consultant?
Most data scientists... don't know what to do. And most clients... don't know what to do with them. So they do little data science projects and build dashboards that few people use. Coming out of McKinsey you can quite confidently say you've learned how to identify top problems, organize a project around it, and solve it in a fast timeline with realistic solutions. That's pretty much gold. It's really useful to be able to say you've worked with c-suite leaders.
Finally, it's probably a function of just fast growth internally. You gain responsibilities much faster at McKinsey than at most most companies. The company invests in your development more. And when you leave, you get weeks of paid time off to search for a new opportunity.
1) You don't need to work your way up the approval chain. Your idea is already going to people with the authority to act on it.
2) You have significant ability to just call people and get them to share their data and domain knowledge
3) You have little risk of long term problems from saying something that someone doesn't like, so long as its not the person who hired you.
4) The pace is probably very very fast relative to the speed of most large orgs. Probably not sustainably fast tbh. It's fine because it's several weeks of hard focus and then a bit of a break.
If you feel like you're doing fine and are answering important questions then you probably are doing just fine and your company's data culture is healthy. IMO people who build analyses that few people want or need are acutely aware of it.
How do you find the split between guys like yourself and the more traditional consultants?
I see little difference. Sometimes it's an EM + 1 or 2 data scientists. Sometimes its an EM + 1 data scientist + 1 or 2 BA/Associates. We solve similar problems, its just the data science people tend to solve it with data and the traditional consultants solve it with interviews and whatever. That's not a swipe at them either. There's a significant quantity of problems that can be easily uncovered by talking to someone who knows the answer but can't get the business to acknowledge it OR by spending a week churning through data to discover it yourself. You might feel better with the hard fact base in hand, but doing those interviews and using the traditional consultant skill set tends to make you far more targeted and efficient in scoping and planning.
"QB" I think operates a little differently, whereby they get the data and tend to do more stuff on their own with dedicated modelers, data engineers, and designers. More "I am the expert here, leave me be". (Also not intended to sound like a swipe. That's a reasonable point of view sometimes).
Hard to answer because "management consultant "(MC) is really an umbrella term for a lot of different roles. One MC might gain quite a lot of experience analyzing the financials of mergers & acquisitions, and so they would develop those skills and be valuable to a company looking to acquire another. Another MC might specialize in projects doing market research for athletic clothes. A third might specialize in finding inefficient processes in a supply chain.
Outside of niche specializations like that, most MC firms (especially the 'elite' ones) work you really hard and expect you to be able to adapt very quickly to new types of projects. This requires a lot of dedication to your work (and willingness to sacrifice non-work obligations) and the ability to learn new things very quickly. If you survive that work for a few years, then, having something like McKinsey on your resume is more like a certification that you are willing to work hard and can learn quickly, which is obviously valued by a lot of companies.
Disagree
> It also explains their virtually universal requirement for an Ivy league (or similar) background.
This is all it is. It’s an indicator that you played the connections game well enough to get into an Ivy and kept up the skills after graduating.
You don’t hire from them for hardworkers. You hire from them for connected people.
You don't hire overachieving 4.0 HYPS grads that have "played the game" since they were 14 because they're the smartest guys / gals around, you do it because they'll work 18 hours a day if needed. It's a great indicator of at least two things
1) The person is able to learn quick, and pick up new things very fast
2) The person has exceptional work ethics, and will do what's expected. You're driven enough to not lose motivation.
And then you set them to do menial grunt-work like fixing spreadsheets and formatting PP slides.
Soft skills that we IT folk tend to hate with a passion, and which really make a massive difference over a life-long career trajectory