Consulting versus other careers. Specifically, consulting versus internal
strategy. This is a question that we get a lot, when we're on-site training and
from our clients. So we thought today we would put out a video that would explain
a little bit more about how consulting firms and the projects they do, differ
from what you would do in an internal strategy group. I'm Jenny Rae the
Managing Director of Management Consulted and I'm excited to walk
through the differences for this. Because honestly, when I was thinking about
consulting I was also interested in working and then internal Strategy Group
at an airline. And after I had all of my offers on the table, I decided that
looking through them, it was really hard to tell what some of the differences are.
So today I want to, from the other side of the veil, explain what the differences
are between consulting and between internal strategy.
First of all, in consulting, you are trained to have flexibility across
multiple projects. You need to be able to cover different kinds of industries,
different kinds of problems, and they never know where they're going to staff
you. You're usually a part of a large, at least local if not regional if not
global staffing pool, and so your flexibility your ability to be skilled
more widely is incredibly important inside the consulting firm. In my
experience now in advising people going into consulting versus internal strategy,
I would say that internal strategy groups trained at only about one-third
the level that a consulting firm does. They spend less time on training, they
spend fewer resources, and they generally draw people out of industries where they
have already received significant training that they rely on when they're
applying your skills to solve internal problems. The second thing that's very
different about internal strategy versus consulting as an external consultant, is
travel. For internal strategy, usually you are co-located with many of the key
decision-makers. And so if your office is in Stamford Connecticut, and you're
traveling to Stamford Connecticut, and most of the other people in your
organization are in Stamford Connecticut, you don't
need to travel. Let's say you're working for a consulting firm that's serving
that same client in Samford Connecticut. But maybe they're coming
from Chicago or San Francisco or somewhere else. And in order to even get
to the client, they themselves need to travel. So there is a huge difference in
the volume of travel that's required between external consultants and
internal consultants. Therefore you'll see a lot of people who are interested
in having more evenings at home during the week and a different kind of
work-life balance, moving toward internal strategy groups.
The third thing that's different, is your industry exposure. Now for many boutique
firms, there are singular industries that they'll work in. They'll become really good
at pharma, or they'll work only in transport. But for most generalist firms,
a lot of the larger firms, like the Big Four advisory practices, or like MBB
firms, you'll find that their focus is to keep you as a generalist, again, referring
back to the flexibility of staffing. They want to be able to pull you off of a
health care project and pop you on to a transport project. They want to pull you off
that transport project and put you on a consumer packaged goods project. So once
you put all of that together, you do get more variety in the external consulting
process. When you're thinking about everything that you need to do inside
external versus internal consulting, the final thing that really differentiates
the two is the duration of the projects. Inside internal consulting you will
often have both strategy as well as implementation projects, with the same
teams and you're incentivized to really follow through and do an excellent job.
Because your likelihood of working with that same organization or other
organizations inside the larger company, will be really different based on the
results that you deliver. Now external consulting firms are constantly having
to sell. They're also having to staff and that turnover in the back curtain
can create a different kind of certainty in longevity,
where the firm is really important, but then the individual people don't work as
long on specific projects. So again if you think that you would
like to have more of a handle on how strategy and implementation go together,
it's more likely that you will get that in an internal strategy group. There are so
many things that are different between external consulting and internal
strategy groups. Now we have an amazing list of some of the world's most popular
internal strategy groups, and we do highly recommend them. But you just have
to remember, your training is going to be different, your industry exposure is
going to be different, your travel is going to be different. And finally, the
length of your projects will be different between external consulting
and internal strategy. If you want some personal advice based on where you are
and where you'd like to go in your career, reach out to us at
www.managementconsulted.com or on social.