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5 Reasons Why Consulting Jobs are Not As Glamorous As Advertised

Ever since I started my undergraduate degree, I was keen on securing a job in strategy consulting. It is not difficult to see why the job is so attractive to young overachievers. You get the opportunity to work in a fast-paced environment surrounding yourself with smart people and learning about business problems in a variety of industries. This ultimately leads to a steep learning curve. The pay and the reputation are great. A few years at a top tier consulting firm will look fantastic on your CV and can open up many career opportunities. And quite frankly, once I went to business school, it often felt like consulting was the only valid career choice out there. Nonetheless, the more consulting experience I gained through internships, the more I realized that the job is not all roses.

1. Work-life balance

It is no secret that work hours are tough, at least in many countries. While most consultancies are establishing programs to reduce work hours and improve work-life balance, my personal experience revealed that this is little more than a marketing effort. The work mentality is too deeply engrained into the culture of most firms and it is difficult to protest when you have plenty of colleagues more than willing to spend 80+ hours a week on the job. The worst part about it is that you are often working for the sake of working, not out of necessity. If you are done with your tasks at 8pm, it doesn’t mean that you can go home, it means that you have time to run an additional analysis – whether it is actually used for the project will be decided later on.

2. Travel

On top of that, travelling every week is a lot less romantic than it sounds. Sure, you may be flying business class and staying at some of the finest hotels. But usually, what you will see of a city is the airport, your hotel, and the office you are working from. In combination with the hours, spending four days a week away from home and needing the weekends to rest means that you may have to give up on your hobbies and drastically reduce your social circle. Of course, this is not a given, but it is a risk you should consider before starting in this line of work.

3. Responsibility

Consulting firms often advertise the high level of responsibility that you will have in an entry-level position, but this is deceiving. Yes, you are working on important projects and you will usually get your own workstream, doing your own research on a particular industry or process and creating your own slides. Ultimately, however, you are doing what the partners and project leaders tell you. Your work will most likely not determine the success or failure of the project; it is a small piece of the puzzle. Although this decreases the risk of failure and makes learning more comfortable, it does not compare to the level of responsibility you could attain in other industries and roles. In many marketing and sales related roles, for instance, you could immediately handle entire products, campaigns, clients, or deals by yourself.

4. Project range

Truth is: the career journey you are promised might not be the career journey you get. A key reason why many people start their career in consulting is because they hope to gain experience in lots of different industries before deciding on a specialization. In reality, things are more complex. Since your first project is often chosen at random, you might end up on a year-long assignment. Suddenly, you are considered an expert on this topic and will face pressure to continue on this path. You have to decide: is it really worth starting from square one again in order to get to know a different industry, or should you leverage your expertise and specialize straight away, boosting your personal brand and opportunities for career advancement? In my time at several leading strategy consulting firms, I met plenty of people who specialized in industries they are not passionate about without ever getting the chance to try something else.

5. Exit Options

“I know consulting is tough, but I will only stay here for a few years and then I’ll find something more relaxed” is a sentence I’ve heard many times. Unfortunately, finding the perfect exit is more difficult than many imagine. If you want to reap the full benefits of your consulting years and manage to find an interesting position elsewhere, you will most likely have to work as hard as before, but you will often get paid less. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a better work-life balance, you may not experience many career advantages compared to the people who entered these jobs straight out of university and worked their way up the corporate ladder. Several of the project managers and partners at top consultancies that I talked to told me they had been wanting to leave for many years, but could not find a more attractive package elsewhere.

Despite all this, starting your career in consulting can be a great move and highly rewarding. Moreover, not everybody will experience the downsides I mentioned. Build your own impression: Doing internships before committing to a full-time job is a great way of finding out what the work is really like and how consultancies differ from each other. Ultimately, you should reflect on your own values and priorities to decide whether the benefits of consulting outweigh the downsides for you.

Martin Keller works as a pre-sales consultant at a leading international technology company. He holds a Master’s degree in Management and completed several successful internships at top tier strategy consulting firms across Europe.

Image: Pexels

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