An insight into the Consulting Industry
Graduate Jobs in Management Consulting
Consulting is where we help our clients solve their business problems or help them meet their business objectives by bringing something to them they may not have, which can be unique experience, doing something similar elsewhere or some specialist skills. Helping businesses improve and effectively become better businesses and by better I mean for them and their stakeholders but also more importantly being better in terms of customer service and meeting their customer’s expectations at the right time in the right place with the right product. You’re a company that makes washing powder, just as an example. You want to concentrate on just making it and shipping it out. You don’t want to have to deal with other things, like for example, payroll, or your customer relationship management system. You just want something that works. You don’t want to have to pull people in to build such systems for you so you use consultants instead who will provide expertise to build what you want and what you need.
The kind of consultancy we do is very deal based so it’s the strategy of deal. So you’re going to buy this business, where could you take this business in 5 years time and how will that impact the financial side of it.
So for example, the kind of different areas you could work in, one would be strategy so a sort of high level overview of what a company is doing and where you can improve their processes and make them more effective. Other areas are supply chains, looking at how you improve the supply and processes of that throughout the company. There is also an area called talent and organisation or performance management so it’s looking at change management and the effects of change on the people within the company. Another area involves more technology so what changes need to go underneath the technology underling all the company needs.
There are also other niche firms who do operational consultancy so firms specialising purely in warehouse operations, for example, so all their people are people who have always worked in warehouses and they will come in and troubleshoot a warehouse for you. Within consultancy I am based within outsourcing in the company and what that means is that companies come to Accenture and want us to run a section for them, so what my team does is once we’ve taken over that part of the company of the company coming in, how do we set up them becoming Accenture employees effectively, how do we re-change what they’re doing to make it more effective so the company gets the best out of them, and how do we manage the change. Supply chain very simply is about how do I buy something? So for example the materials to make the products I am making, where do I make them? How do I then move them to my market? How do I then store them in my market and then how do I then deliver that product to my customers in that market. So for example, a recent client that I worked with, we set up a new warehouse which was to serve all their customers across Europe so we set up a team of 15-20 people looking at different aspects of how we would need to set that organisation and that new operation up.
Thinking about the last project I did which was a prior equity company that owned a business and the business was trying to re-finance a loan and the bank wanted to know in 5 years time, are they going to be able to pay the loan back. So what we were doing, we were looking at the profit forecast, we were looking at the budget and you would be going into a business sitting down with the financial director, the managing director and maybe the operational director and asking them questions about their business. Have they got 10,000 customers this year? No, ok, how are they going to get an extra 2000 customers? Have they opened more stores? Yes, right, how many new customers does a new store bring in? 500 customers, so they can only open 4 stores. So our assumptions are correct, we reckon they will probably be able to make that amount of profit next year, put that in the report, everything seems ok, assumptions seem reasonable, move on.
I’m a manager within consulting so I typically doing project managing of IT projects so we will get called into a company for some project that will involve IT to deliver some business change and that change could be to lower cost or a new functionality enabling some kind of change for the business. Helping them build or run systems, or see how feasible they are; basically anything to do with a technical system that a business may use we help them with the entire life cycle to help them realise what they need. So we have experience in project managing and we are very successful of bringing together different parts of our organisation, different skills so that could be bringing in different skills like tax or corporate finance for example as well as IT and that is something that companies don’t necessarily have available under one roof.
When we are on a client site we will match ourselves in terms of business dress or match ourselves to the client. So if the client requires their employees to dress very formally then we do whereas if people are turning up in t-shirts and shorts then there is obviously a lot more flexibility there.
The demographic can be different every time, the offices can be new, they can be old and the facilities there can be fantastic or awful. Working in Heathrow was quite tough because there were no shops around whereas working in central London there is plenty of life and you can go and sit in one of the London parks to have your lunch for example.
I don’t have a “boss”. In other corporations your results don’t matter much; it’s basically what your boss thinks of you. Whereas what we have here, you have somebody, a senior person who sorts out the staffing, a senior person who sorts out the projects you are going to go on and another senior person who collates all your feedback and reviews it. What that means is that there is no centralised power above you so you have someone you kind of answer to because they are looking at what projects you are working on and then you have lots of different project managers. All those project managers collate feedback which then goes to your performance manager and he writes a report on you. So because it’s such a flat structure, there is no hero culture, there’s no, I’ve got to impress this person or that person, so it’s a really friendly environment.
Certainly within consulting there is an expectation that you are flexible and mobile. In the first 5 or 6 years of my career I probably spent 80% of my time out of London and a lot of that time was actually in Europe, so I would leave my house at 5.45am to go to Heathrow to fly somewhere in Europe and in reality it became just like getting on a bus in the morning. Every Monday morning I’d get on an aeroplane, I’d spend 3 or 4 nights away and then I’d come home. To be honest in the last 2 to 3 years I’ve been lucky in that most of my clients have been around London and the South-East so I have not travelled as much but there is always the expectation of travelling.
The toughest part is when you start a new role because you get to a point where you’re comfortable doing what you’re doing and you may not be learning as much but you’re comfortable in what you’re doing and then you’re told you’re starting a new role. Sometimes it’s hard, you have to tell people hard things or make difficult decisions so that’s in itself is really challenging. Like any job I guess, sometimes it feels you have so much going on; there aren’t enough hours in the week. So yes, there are times when you’re working very hard but I believe there are peaks and troughs.
I love the fact that I’m 25 and I get to sit down with finance directors and I don’t think I could do that anywhere else other than for another consultancy. I really enjoy that and I really like the exposure. Lots of different types of clients, different organisations in different parts of the UK or the world, I do enjoy that diversity and variety and so it keeps it very interesting. It’s just so varied. Every three to four months you’ve created something and you’ve finished something that’s really tangible and you can see the effect you have had. You can walk away from a client site thinking you really have done a good job and you’ve made a difference. So I love that bit. One of the first projects I got involved in was congesting charging when Deloitte was helping design and implementing congesting charging and having recently moved to London that was quite an exciting thing to get involved in because you actually, within a year or two, see the visible change and the impact of what you are doing.
Certainly, you need to be quite motivated to do the job. You have to be a self-starter because a lot of the role is around you needing to structure and develop your own work. You need to be able to look at a problem no matter whether its technical, business, people, logistics or anything. You need to be able to look at it and get round those problems. You’re dealing with so many different clients in different situations and as a consequence of that you really build up a high level of different skills across different areas so I liked the idea that it was really varied and working in different places for different people and consequently really built up a good idea of perhaps what I wanted to do later on.
I think you can pick up any skills you need. I think you’ve just got to want to do it. If you’ve got an interest in business and an interest in companies and breaking down and understanding them, then the rest of the skills you can pick them up.
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