Consulting

Industry Overview

Imagine spending your day giving advice to other people, telling them how to run their businesses better or how to save money on hiring new employees. You’ve spent your years at school or in the workforce acquiring knowledge and now you’re able to sell it for hundreds of dollars an hour. Consulting firms are traditionally among the largest employers of top MBA and college graduates. With various specialties like IT, human resources and business strategy consulting on the growth fast track, if you’ve got the qualifications it’s likely that these firms will hungrily read your resume.

More than half the people in top MBA programs and a significant number of college seniors flirt with the idea of becoming a management consultant after graduation. It’s a high-paying, high-profile field that offers students the opportunity to take on a lot of responsibility right out of school and quickly learn a great deal about the business world. But many mid-career professionals, too, decide to take their expertise to consulting firms or hang out their own shingle and begin selling what they know. Most consultants specialize in a particular field, and if you have a big career coup that you can tout—such as having success at a big company, or launching a high-profile product or initiative—that’s exactly the kind of calling card you can take advantage of to get clients.

In essence, consultants are hired advisors to corporations. They tackle a wide variety of business problems and provide solutions for their clients. Depending on the size and chosen strategy of the firm, these problems can be as straightforward as researching a new market or as complex as totally rethinking the client’s organization. No matter what the engagement, the power that management consultants wield is hard to scoff at. They can advise a client to acquire a related company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or reduce the size of its workforce by thousands of employees.

Consulting is a big, one-size-fits-all term that includes virtually any form of advice-giving. Many people think first of management consulting, also called strategy consulting, which specializes in providing advice about strategic and core operational issues—but there are many other types of consulting, including marketing consulting, technology consulting, human resources consulting, just to name a few.

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Consulting Job Listings