Consulting Firms: what’s the difference?
What really is “consulting”?
When I first came to understand what a “consulting job” looked like, I understood it to be like a rotational internship: you do different projects of different lengths with different clients in different industries. Kind of like doing 4 weeks in marketing, then 3 weeks in finance, followed by another 4 weeks in HR… To a Jill-of-all-trades-wannabe like myself, this sounded awesome! I couldn’t believe I had never heard of this as a career option; o consulting, where hath thou been all my life?!
I spent 8 years trying to get into consulting - that is, from finding out about consulting existing in junior year of college to attending orientation for my first, fancy consulting job. In that time, I had done countless coffee-chat informational interviews, spoken to friends and acquaintances who had gotten into consulting out of university, and attended scores of informational sessions and career fair season seminars during the first semester of business school (the only real period of “exploration” or preparation for recruiting that a 2-year Masters program affords you).
To the best of my ability, I learned to talk the talk. I nodded along empathetically to the buzz words these intimating and awe-striking shiny consultants used, like “due diligence,” “thought leadership” and “deliverables.” I parroted back the cliche of wanting to solve interesting problems and work with smart people: I wanted to work in consulting because I liked problem-solving, I had an analytical mindset, I wanted to make an impact. (Ironic spoiler alert: when I didn’t pass the final round with McKinsey, an MBA classmate attempted to comfort me with, “Cheer up, when have you heard of a consultant who’s changed the world?”)
Of the many things my prolonged job search didn’t uncover, the one that I understood so poorly I couldn’t even have articulated my confusion as a question was this: different consulting firms seem to do different types of work - but how exactly are those types of work different?
I’ll call them different models of consulting. Here’s a retrospective guide on various consulting models as I’ve come to understand and categorize them, now that I’m “in the industry.”