This paper will introduce the consulting industry from the basic situation, career development path, recruitment, assessment and working methods of consulting companies.
To sum up, the advantages of consulting industry are:
1, with clear career development, direct path and rapid development.
Compared with other industries, the career steps of consulting industry are very clear, and the annual difference between each step is also very clear. In the consulting industry, you don't need to cut your hair to find opportunities for promotion, you just need to be excellent. As long as you get in, no matter what level, as long as your age is up, whether you are promoted depends on whether you are excellent or not, and you don't have to worry about whether there are vacancies, backgrounds or other conditions unrelated to your work ability and achievements.
The consulting industry generally ranges from the lowest analyst to the highest partner, and can reach 13 at the earliest. In other words, if you graduate from college and enter a consulting company at the age of 22, you can become a partner at the age of 35. Of course, such people are smart.
2. With the development of the profession, the wage growth is rapid, the wage growth rate is clear, and the industry wage is relatively standardized.
For a long time, an important reason why college students have become the first choice for job hunting is that the salary of consulting industry is generally high and the standards are transparent. The annual salary of the consulting company is 200,000 yuan, which may be reached in two or three years after work. The annual salary of 654.38+00,000 yuan is not a dream.
There are also several major strategic consulting companies that adopt global compensation, and that compensation is more attractive.
Moreover, the salary of consulting companies is strictly linked to performance and level. That is to say, as long as you work hard and excel, salary growth is not a dream. Don't worry, money will come naturally.
This may be why consulting companies have become a successful grassroots industry abroad. You can be born in poverty, but as long as you are excellent, you can still enter the elite of society through consulting industry.
3, comprehensive skills requirements, easy to develop comprehensive skills, leaving the industry often directly into enterprise management.
The skills developed by consulting companies are very comprehensive.
From the perspective of industry knowledge, the consulting company's projects may cover the projects of various industries, so you have the opportunity to contact the problems of various industries, from the macro overview of the industry to the specific problems of a single enterprise, so as to have a very in-depth understanding of the industry.
In terms of professional knowledge, consulting companies have to solve the problem of management or operational efficiency for the industry. Therefore, consultants may often come into contact with all aspects of enterprise management and have the opportunity to understand the deep-seated things of enterprise management. Their professional knowledge often involves everything from strategy to marketing to logistics to human resources.
As far as the professional skills of consultants are concerned, they are also required to be very comprehensive, not only to collect information for analysis, but also to write reports, and to have strong self-confidence and logic to communicate with customers. In addition, we need to be able to toss about some miscellaneous project management and solve the problems of customer buying and third parties.
Therefore, consulting companies cultivate generalists.
Because of the high intensity of consulting projects, the accumulation of knowledge and skills of consultants has been accelerated. Clients often challenge our young consultants and say that my team has worked in this industry for more than ten years. What makes you think that a consultant who has only worked for a few years can help me solve the problem?
In fact, the understanding of the industry is not only in that year. Even in different positions in an industry, if you don't look at the sky with inertial thinking for ten years, some people only know the industry, but lack the possibility of seeing the overall situation of the industry and jumping out of the shackles of daily work to see the direction change.
The disadvantages of consulting industry are:
1, the industry requires high performance, and most companies are either going up or out, or doing well or sweeping the floor.
The path of career development is clear, and the opposite of rapid development is that a person who runs slowly and does not seek "progress" is not allowed.
The consulting company requires everyone to run hard and strive for Excellence. If you just want to muddle along, you will be kicked out soon.
Mixed mentality is not encouraged, but if you want to focus on other aspects of your life at a certain stage of your life and have low requirements for your own work progress, it is difficult for consulting companies to find such a platform, so that you can only stay at one level for several years.
2. Lifestyle challenges, high-intensity and long-term travel often make it difficult to balance personal and family life.
Overtime in consulting industry is not a special phenomenon, just like you have to eat and sleep, it is a normal phenomenon. Moreover, there is no concept of overtime work at all, or the consultant is always working except eating, drinking and sleeping. Working 12 hours a day belongs to low intensity, and reaching 1 1 at night belongs to medium intensity. If any project can get off work at 6 o'clock, then this project is simply problematic.
Most of the projects of consulting companies are carried out in the clients' offices, which means that wherever the clients are, consultants will basically work there. Generally, the duration of the project is 3-6 months. After that, we will move to another place. Large consulting companies fly back during the project, that is, once a week or twice a week to fly back to headquarters.
So when you go to a consulting company for an interview, the interviewer often asks the candidate if you can accept the lifestyle of the consulting company. Before you decide to enter the consulting industry, you really need to think about this problem.
Generally speaking, consulting companies are divided into three categories, the first category is strategic consulting companies, the second category is comprehensive consulting companies, and the third category is IT consulting companies.
The first category: projects represented by McKinsey, Boston, Bain and roland berger, which only do strategic and management consulting, covering professional functional strategies such as enterprise development strategy, enterprise merger and acquisition, market/human resources/supply chain/e-commerce/digitalization.
The second category: represented by Accenture and IBM, engaged in the consulting field from strategy to management to IT consulting and implementation. In short, in addition to the consulting content covered by the first type of companies, IT consulting and IT implementation have also been added. Compared with the first company, it is characterized by end-to-end. In an environment where almost all the management optimization of modern enterprises will be realized through IT and systems, the advantage of such consulting companies is that they will not talk on paper and even implement the suggestions for efficiency optimization in the last mile. This kind of consulting company is relatively new in enterprise merger and acquisition and enterprise development strategy consulting, and has a good team, but the team size is small.
The third category: represented by Capgemini and KPMG, focusing on IT consulting and system implementation. In recent years, some management consulting has also been carried out.
At present, the boundaries between these three types of companies are increasingly blurred. For example, the first type of companies are also conducting more and more IT consulting, the second type of companies are taking an increasing proportion in the field of strategic consulting, and the third type of companies are gradually extending to management consulting.
Especially the rise of digitalization in recent years. Digitalization is a technology-driven change. If a consulting company doesn't know the technology in the digital field when formulating a digital strategy, then such a strategy is worthless on paper, and even depends on how to prioritize various initiatives and define the required financial investment resources. Based on the rapid growth of business demand, the business scope of these three types of companies has gradually become consistent. For example, the first company, such as McKinsey, also set up digital related technical teams around the world, or let itself have the technical execution ability in the digital field in a cooperative way; The second company relies on its own advantages in the IT field to quickly establish a comprehensive and huge digital implementation capability, and at the same time quickly seize the cornerstone territory of digital strategic consulting; The third company also invested heavily in building its own digital team.
Therefore, digitalization has also become an opportunity for the consulting industry to reshuffle.
Knowing the types of consulting companies is helpful to make clear the future project types, areas of concern and development direction when choosing jobs.
The career steps of consulting companies are very clear. Generally speaking, the entry level is analyst, then consultant, manager or contact manager, senior manager and partner. Or in the last three levels, there are managers or business managers, partners and partners. Of course, there are levels above the partners, and there are great differences between companies.
It takes about 2-3 years from analyst to consultant, 2-3 years from consultant to manager in some companies and 3-N years in some companies. In a company with a senior manager, it usually takes 3-4 years for a manager to be a senior manager, but it may take more than 4 years. However, if you can't be promoted for more than five years, the best choice is to leave. The minimum requirement for a manager or senior manager to become a deputy partner or partner is 3 years, but it usually takes more years to achieve the next promotion. Promoting partners is the most important promotion in the consulting industry, and almost all people who enter the consulting industry take this as their ultimate goal.
The analyst's job is mainly to assist the consultant in data collection, digital analysis and manuscript writing.
A consultant's job needs to be responsible for an output in the project, design the method and analysis framework of the output, guide the work of analysts, and analyze and draw opinions, conclusions and inferences about a certain problem based on the information collected by analysts.
The manager's job needs to be responsible for the whole project. A project may have several outputs obtained by different consultants. Managers need to master the final intention of customers, the overall method and framework of the project, the final conclusions and deliverables, as well as the progress of the project, project resources, project finance, and the relationship with customers, as well as the interaction with customers, in order to gain customer support and reach a consensus with customers on project management.
Senior managers often manage a large project or multiple projects. In addition to managing projects, senior managers are also responsible for projects, and sometimes they will become leaders and experts in a small professional field or a new product (service). In addition to project implementation, senior managers began to undertake project sales targets. This level is actually a transition and an important assessment before becoming a partner.
As the top level of consulting industry, partners are radiant and dazzling. In fact, you can say that there is no difference between work and other levels. Partners may look at ppt most carefully, and every number and word should be perfect. The success or failure of each project is ultimately the responsibility of the partners.
Partners are called partners because there are shares in the company at this level, and the annual income has changed from fixed salary plus bonus to fixed salary plus stock dividend, and the proportion of shares in income has greatly increased. I compared the salary of several companies at this level, and the stock can account for 20%-70%.
The partner has become one of the shareholders of the company, which is of course the responsibility of the shareholders. Partner is the only consulting company at all levels that regards performance appraisal as the most important evaluation index. Income and profit are two major indicators of partners, and the realization of this indicator will directly affect their income.
The consulting industry is an industry selling "people". The income and profits of partners are realized through teams, and a strong team can realize the performance of each partner. On the contrary, if the income and profit can't be carried out as planned, it means that the partner can't afford to support his team, and maybe he should consider reducing staff.
To further elaborate this point, "people" are commodities in the consulting industry, and the utilization rate of people directly affects the profit rate of consulting companies. What lawyers need to record is how much of their time is bought by clients, and so is the consulting industry. How much time consultants (collectively referred to at all levels) buy for customers reflects the quality of a company's operation. The increase of this indicator indicates that the business is very good. If this indicator drops or remains sluggish, the consulting company needs to carefully analyze the reasons, whether it is the overall market situation is not good, or the competitiveness of the team, or whether the things provided are outdated and need to be transformed or repackaged. In the short term, when the index drops to a certain amount, consulting companies may have to consider layoffs.
So partners are equivalent to entrepreneurs. Consultants often aim at this, but they don't understand the nature of partners' work at all. Partner is a milestone, but it is also a new starting point, the starting point of entrepreneurship.