Like many of my graduating peers, I was busy attending career talks, networking events and pondering career options at NUS several years ago.
I was an electrical engineering major but had also been immersed in a highly selective global entrepreneurship program mostly sponsored by the university that took me to the US for a full year where I worked in a startup and received premier Wharton School business education.
While many of my friends were lured to the financial industry (mostly banks), I never had a strong interest in that industry and hence, pretty much avoided that path. Still, figuring out what to do was tough despite eliminating an financially lucrative option. It didn't dawn on me that there is a career called management consulting; and seriously, What is management consulting?
Unlike business school undergraduates, engineering students rarely had opportunities to learn more about non-engineering careers until we are about to graduate. To date, this is still an issue that I grumble about but let's leave that to another post.
Because non-business undegrads typically are not aware of an interesting, lucrative and largely considered as prestigious career called management consulting, they obviously are not able to apply to such a job or prepare themselves for it. However, management consultancies are constantly on the look-out for smart people regardless of their majors. Hence, you can already see a mis-match in the supply and demand conditions of management consultants.
What Management Consultants Do
Starting off with a very high level and basic definition, management consultants work in teams to help their high profile senior management clients define and solve the business problems that they are facing.
Why that is Interesting Work
Management consulting projects typically last between a few weeks to a few months. As consultants move to a new project after completing an existing one, they get exposed to new team members, new client counterparts, maybe new industries and likely new business functions. Isn't that exciting?!
Imagine yourself in a team of 3-5 consultants that over a period of 2mths, help a telco MNC formulate a growth strategy that your team justifies will help it grow revenues by 20% y-o-y for the next 3 years.
Thereafter, you move on to a new project where you are helping a consumer electronics MNC develop a new marketing campaign to raise customer acquisition rates. And on and on...
Why People with Technical backgrounds can fit the job as well
Management consulting is after all nothing but problem solving for your clients. It does require consultants to be intellectually curious, capable, structured and the list goes on. But it definitely isn't just the domain of business undergrads of MBAs. As long as you are a structured problem solver, you are halfway there, really. As with things in general, practice makes perfect and you can train your way to getting a management consulting job even if you have never worked in one of the traditional business functions (e.g. marketing, sales, etc.) roles.
I am taking a shot in the dark but I'm hypothesizing that each year, less than 20% of the graduates from NUS, NTU, SMU and other universities in Singapore are aware of such a career option. Just the exciting nature of its work should raise that statistic considerably although there are other pros and cons of the job that will entice or weed out would-be applicants...to be covered in the next post...
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