The below is a set of lessons that I learnt during my journey to becoming accepted as a Business

Analyst at McKinsey & Company (London office). While not an exhaustive guide, I hope that my
experience helps others on their path to management/strategy consulting.

Personal experience

Why consulting and how did you come about choosing it?

- Impact, accelerator, fast-thinking colleagues – met consultants and was blown away at how fast-paced,
change-oriented, happy they were?

- Did a lot of work that just didn’t enthuse me.

- Social impact – liked how these firms used it as a lens for every project.

What did I learn from the process?

- You have to be convinced this is the right path for you. You are often level-headed and understand what
a job like this will mean (it’s tough work!) and how it will progress you to the next stage of your ambitions.

- Remind yourself of your purpose and why you want to go into consulting – drive down into your real
needs and ask whether you should just be applying for consulting. Read this:
https://80000hours.org/articles/alternatives-to-consulting/

- Why consultancy? I always answered this by saying why x firm, and then why I wanted to be a
consultant for this firm specifically. Look at and refer to their work, their teams, their specialisms, their
recent reports – where do they lead the market? What changes have they generated that you might be
able to feel (there will be many!)? What do you like about their working practices?

- They’re looking for parts of your interview where you stand out – this is how you’ll get through, focus on
where you’re 3/3 stars and are unique compared to other applicants. Try and follow what you’re
passionate about rather than applying with a CV full of consultancy experience.

- You must be genuinely enthused and willing to solve problems.

What should a consultant be? What are they looking for?

- Macro-level maths and problem solving, drive, hunger to learn, knowing how to follow a logical process

What was your experience applying to consulting as a woman?

- Asked case about gender equality, entry level, consultants tend to be pretty gender equal, but when
entering to manager and partner level the main problems stem from not enough applicants are women,
and women leaving the workforce into other/part-time roles. Need to focus more on retention through
paternity pay, better flexitime etc.

- Most leadership tends to be men but there are an increasing number of initiatives going out of their way
to recruit non-white, non-male (Bain’s True North, McKinsey Women Achievement Award).

- Best things to look out for as a woman: anti-bias measures (especially in recruiting, as well as periodic
retraining for employees), visible role models – are there women in positions you’d be looking for? 24
week paternity pay: consultancy firms all about people and employees, lead gender-equality
restructuring. If they’re inconsistent call them out.

- FlexTime and flexible working arrangements, in my final rounds spoke about sleep, gender equality,
family-specific town halls – they care a lot about wellbeing.

- Travel and family: consultancy often involves a lot of travel and moving around for projects. Think about
whether this is something you’d like to do, often with long flight hours and shorter weekends resultantly,
different hours to friends and family.
Case

What is a case study?

A case study is a simulation of a real-life consulting problem. Except you’re expected to do in 45 minutes what
consultants will likely do over a few months with a number of team mates. You will be fed data and expected to
solve a problem, bottleneck or help a client (company or government) to make a decision (like whether to build a
new school in a town). These span across several industries and issues.

- Manner and professionalism, communications and presence

o I picked up a lot of this from practice and seeing how other people responded to these
questions. Write down when someone uses something you like or sounds good when you’re
interviewing them.

o Come across as personable but professional: treat the interviewer like a client, a manager or a
team mate (depending on the firm) – collaborative and inquisitive approach, team orientated but
also driving to a problem and not letting obstacles get in the way.

o Succinct: drive to answer quickly and cleanly, don’t embellish your communications with extra
info. State what you mean and explain why you’re doing it – that way if your logic is wrong you
can be redirected.

o Questions: ask clarifying questions at the beginning and throughout – act as if you are having a
conversation with the client and you want to earn their trust while ensuring you are covering
everything.

▪ Before going further, I want to clarify…

o Then pause, say you’re going to take a few minutes to structure your thoughts and draw out, in
front of them, an understandable structure on paper. Use few words in the structure and turn
the paper around to get your interviewer engaged and make sure they know where you are in
your thought process. Remember: they’re looking to see how your brain works.

o Time: take your time (please!) – take at least 2-3 mins if it means you will structure an answer
impeccably. Far better to take another minute for a well-delivered, well-structured answer. Set
out your approach through a problem tree and stick with the approach – be consistent and
continue pursuing an answer through your problem tree, keep referring back to it once you’ve
drawn it up.

o Answer first: I will do *conclusion* because x, y, z. Not x, y, z and thus *conclusion*.

- Hypothesis and problem trees:

o Buckets – these are 3-4 strands of thought that collect other thoughts. A way of exhibiting
structure.

o Frameworks: look at pre-existing frameworks like porter’s 5PS, become acquainted with
different ways you might go about solving a problem but know these are outdated, my advice is
to become so well acquainted with these that you begin to form your own frameworks. After a
while your mind just naturally begins to structure problems using buckets (really! Which is why
practicing and starting early is most useful). Crafting cases has a few foundations for
techniques for making frameworks from scratch: processual, opposite (e.g. organic/inorganic
growth) etc.

o MECE: Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive (you’ll hear this a lot). ME: break down into
components that don’t overlap. CE: always add an other just in case something unexpected
comes up along the way – be careful, you may not get the bucket that has the answer you need
in it.
 o Practice creating these for fun (maybe not fun, but alongside your case practice). Go 3 layers
down and distinguish yourself by writing hypotheses by the third layer.

o Look over your economics 101: revenue drivers: increase sales, improve marketing strategy,
cost drivers: FC/VC – change production, distribution strategy (Prep lounge has a good section
for these, also AS Level economics concepts. If you struggle with these, learn them from
flashcards). I was asked in an interview to distinguish clearly between what was a fixed cost
and what was a variable cost, so become so well acquainted with these that you can have a
discussion about how variable factors are in the long/short run.

- Driving to an answer and digging deeper

o Keep key ideas or assumptions in a box at the top right hand corner – use paper in a structured
way to keep on top of everything.

o Your interviewer may keep asking you why, so be prepared to justify everything you’ve written
up until this point.

- Further question: could you describe the pros and cons of doing x? May ask you not to brainstorm at this
point if you’re short on time.

- Concluding and recommendations. They will likely ask you to sum up but if you offer this and are ahead
of the game they’ll be mightily impressed.

o My recommendation is that the client should ___ because 1, 2, 3 – SO clear

o Next steps: May ask for your ideas on implementation – use this space to exhibit creativity. Or,
given this, the risks are ___ so I would ___ to think about mitigating these.

Comms:

- Always say why you need something. Even if it’s wrong, you want to show them your thought process.

- You want to be in the driving seat, want to be trusted. If you’re not sure about your maths, tell them you
want to try something again as you’ve sense-checked (does it LOOK right?) and it doesn’t seem right –
intuition is important.

- I want to start here because of x, y – they may correct you or steer you in another direction but
throughout you should be driving.

What happens in interview setting?

- Normally paired with a personal experience or fit interview – telling stories about a time that you led a
team, faced a challenge. Will also be some questions about how you’d work in a team and the extent to
which you’d work with integrity about handling sensitive information.

- Sometimes market sizing (how much would a restaurant earn in a year, excluding Tuesdays, for
example). Expect that a market sizing could be incorporated into the case e.g. a woman’s fashion brand
want to expand into China, is there a large enough market? Would the move make sense given this/be
feasible/what about the existing players in the market and how much of that market share could we be
expected to take?

- Two types of case: interviewer or candidate-led. Earlier rounds likely to be more interviewer-led, but will
often want you to lead the case in final rounds and know what data you will need to solve the case and
go looking for it – if you look in the right places they’ll trust you as a future employee.

- Sometimes a presentation, given a deck of 20-50 slides, have to filter through and find appropriate info.
Go in with a hypothesis and know what you’re looking for, do it quickly. Present in bullet points, always
answer first.

How can I prepare?

 - Get started now, find case partners with each other, online with case coach or prep lounge. Some unis
will have many people applying to consulting and taking it seriously, some will not – don’t let this stop
you! Ask around, look online, look abroad.

- Maths prep every day – get your mind back into it, download an app for all your spare time like
commuting (maybe not in corona…) but instead of looking at social media, flick through some addition
and subtraction instead.

o Some tips: notate your numbers to the power of 10 – work out nifty tricks to get maths done
quickly and notation that will make you less prone to making mistakes

o Maths is not about making mistakes, it’s about execution – do you go about looking for the right
answers and know what calculations are required to get you there? If you get something wrong,
don’t let it rattle you – keep asking questions, stay calm, recover, dive back in. Your being calm
under pressure will be more of a bonus than what you’ve lost with a slight slip in the maths.

o Use units like k or m to reduce the possibility of slipping (short hand).

- Econ terms: fixed costs, variable costs, profitability, sunk costs, get familiar with costing structures, a
variety of industries, a variety of clients. You’ll get better acquainted with each of these with more
practice and be less put off by them in an interview setting.

- Creativity: ask yourself what else? When coming up with solutions go out the box a little and exhibit your
strengths of brainstorming – this could be your 3/3 stars moment!

- Data: look at data sources and strive to find insights – any anomalies? What do these mean?

- Resources: crafting cases, Case in Point or Victor Cheng (his youtube was more useful), caution: don’t
be overly reliant on frameworks!

- Listen carefully to case – in one interview I was asked to complete a task in 1-2 weeks, few people
apparently heard this detail and proceeded to approach the case differently, less urgency

And lastly, remind yourself that it’s just a job! There are a million routes both in and out of consulting,
and something you can pick up at any life or career stage. I was rejected multiple times, and
sometimes you’re just not what they’re looking for or what they need in that moment, and that’s okay!
You may be just what they need next time, or maybe life is meant to guide you in a different direction. I
promise you that you’ll still end up exactly where you should be provided you keep driven and focused
on what you want out of life.