DON'T JOIN CONSULTING if... | Reality of being a consultant

this is a pretty big deal breaker that firms try to weed out immediately when they're looking to hire new people was joining the consulting industry when i found out how aggressive people can get hi everyone for those of you who are visiting my channel for the first time i'm mika kim and i used to be a consultant at one of the big four consulting firms in this video i will talk about five reasons why consulting might not be a good fit for you despite the role of a consultant being portrayed as prestige and glorious consulting is a type of career that is very hit or miss based on your personality or preference hopefully this video will be able to provide you with a bit more insight about what it means to be a consultant and if this job will be a right fit for you as a disclaimer i'm not saying any of these following traits are bad or wrong honestly i fall under some of these categories myself which made me leave consulting please note that anything i talk about today is based on my personal experience and your experience may differ so let's dive right in consulting will not be a good fit for you if number one you do not enjoy working with others this is a pretty big deal breaker that firms try to weed out immediately when they're looking to hire new people even when i was interviewing for one of the big four companies one of our interview loops was a networking session with partners senior managers and candidates all mingling together in one room and as you might have guessed this is so the firm can gauge an understanding of how likable sociable and approachable you are as a person consulting is all about working with different people you'll be constantly changing teams and meeting new people through different projects being able to work well with your colleagues is obviously a given but the clients also need to like you remember consulting source of profit comes from their clients and the projects that they win from them let's say the client doesn't like working with you they will ask the firm to remove you from the project and the firm has no choice but to do so why because the clients are the buyer think of it this way let's say you needed to buy a hat and you got one from zara you tried it and didn't like it what do you do you go get an exchange or even a refund think of yourself as the hat if the client is not satisfied with you the firm will have no choice then to remove you because they don't want to lose their customer for future business if this keeps happening the firm will never try to put you on important projects probably like how unpopular items won't be positioned on the window display i'm sorry i compared people to hats obviously human resources are much more sophisticated than that but this was just an analogy to dumb down the concepts so that you could understand how the relationship between a client and a consulting firm works now this is important because this concept will come up again in the video number two you hate change and competition as i mentioned earlier consulting is a very dynamic and volatile career your project and your team will change consistently one day you might be working for a financial services client a couple of weeks in you finally get settled in with the team builds a relationship with the client and boom the next day you might be put on an oil industry client with a complete different set of new people and as you can see you're exposed to a lot of change in a short amount of time if this is not your cup of tea and you'd prefer to work in a more consistent and stable environment then consulting might not be a good fit for you in addition you will find yourself consistently competing with your peers for better projects and for promotion now this used to stress me out a lot i thought that i was a pretty competitive person but oh boy was joining the consulting industry when i found out how aggressive people can get i have had colleagues that would intentionally hide what kind of projects they're on or what kind of people that they're networking with in order to position themselves to be more advantageous compared to their peers so they could get promoted faster just the politics was insane you need to keep proving your worth to the leaders in the company and give them a reason to put you on high visibility projects that will help you move up the ladder and in my opinion this is a perfect formula for burnouts what this means is just by working hard and doing well at your job is not good enough you need to play politics and because of the way the system is structured the work culture becomes pretty toxic now this is actually a perfect segue into my next point which is number three you want a work-life balance during my orientation week as a new grad hire as a consultant one of the partners came up to stage and gave us a little speech and a part of the speech that i still remember went something like this work-life balance means different things to different people and i was like what he was essentially saying there will be no work-life balance and unfortunately he was right to understand why this kind of culture is formed let's go back to the first and second point since the consulting firm makes money by selling projects to clients they have the motivation to make the project low-cost and over promised and because of that undersell over promising the employees working on the projects end up suffering from that let's say the sport that needs to be done realistically will get done by three people the consulting firm will try to cut down that cost by putting only one resource on it and now this one person will now have to do three persons worth of work and that's where all this overtime is coming from the problem would be solved if all the employees got up and said nah i'm not going to be working all day every day right well now this leads to my second point where i said it's a very competitive culture so if this particular work is deemed as a good opportunity there will always be some kind of person that steps up to take on that role and to make matters worse in addition to regular client work you do every day you also have to work on some kind of internal company initiatives this could be anything like writing a request for proposal recruiting and any other internal projects literally so much work to do and so little time my average work hours used to be around 12 plus hours and working during weekends and holidays was also very very common i would get calls and texts from work at these random sporadic times asking me to do something once i was on a street car and i got an email asking me to fix something asap and they needed this right now so i had to pull out my laptop in the middle of a crowded street car to fix something on this deck and send it to them like are you kidding me it wasn't even that urgent like you all know what a street car is right like this thing right here ah and this just happened way too commonly not to mention uber rides back home at night would be basically my office v2 i still remember vividly i'd be riding back on my uber and it'll be around midnight i'd have my hot spot on fiercely typing away on my laptop it was not fun times i used to be so paranoid whenever i heard the notification sound on my phone because i thought it'd be someone from work asking me to do something even thinking about this right now makes me shudder moving on to the next point number four you have a hard time saying no now going back to my orientation story as a new grad hire as a part of that orientation there's this acted out skit where managers will pretend to be clients and you'll be broken out into these little teams and you would try to come up with some kind of solution for the client so this was basically an acted out case competition in a way now as a part of the skit there's a scenario where a manager pretended to be a very rude client very aggressive that would try to coerce you into getting more work done than what was initially promised later in the grading rubric it is revealed that you were actually supposed to push back and say no to that request because an increase in scope might actually violate the sow so the reason why i told that story is you need to be prepared to have uncomfortable and awkward situations with your clients and accept that this will be a part of your daily life now this applies outside of client work as well you will often times have a lot of managers and leaders reach out to you telling you that there is this great opportunity to join this project and they will try to delegate part of their work to you why is that bad it's because that work might not necessarily be something you're interested in or that will help you with your growth a very common saying would be something like hey mika i'm a leader at the service line we have this good opportunity for you for you to gain a lot of experience in this field and this is a very high visibility project and you will be able to position yourself to get promoted for senior be aware of these things don't take all their word for it but actually sit down and analyze if this work is a good opportunity for you or not and if you think it won't then be comfortable saying no if not the unfortunate reality is that bad managers will try to take advantage of you and the situation i've actually overheard managers say something like oh i know this person they always say yes to projects so let me try to toss my work onto them how messed up is that in addition to having extra work this will hinder your growth because this blocks you from taking other opportunities that could have exposed you to areas that you're truly interested in and number five you hate writing when you become a consultant you will be writing all the time i guarantee you so get used to it you might think as soon as you join consulting you'll be all nicely freshly dressed up in your suit traveling around the world driving meetings and presenting in front of clients but the true reality is you'll be writing rsps or creating presentational decks you will be writing non-stop so if writing is not your cup of tea then you might not really enjoy your day-to-day work as a consultant it's kind of like the same with lawyers where when we think of lawyers we have this image of them walking into the courtroom all ready to battle their opponent when in reality a lot of their time is mostly reading and writing same with consulting i just wanted to add in this meme because i thought it was very appropriate and it was really funny if you see this guy here yeah he's probably editing his deck right now i didn't create this video to tell you don't join consulting if one or many of these traits apply to you or to discourage you from pursuing a career in consulting as with any decision you should be fully aware of what to expect when making the choice to start a career in consulting that is why i created this video so that you can start thinking about if this kind of work culture is right for you so it seemed like i highlighted all the negative things about consulting but there's also a lot of reasons why consulting is an excellent career choice i will definitely create a video about that soon so please subscribe if you're interested in watching more and please click the like button if this video was helpful as always thank you so much for watching this video and i will see all of you soon bye

Channel: Mika Kim

Views: 1,312,652

Keywords: consulting, consultant, management consultant, tech consultant, IT consultant, career in consulting, consulting firm, why consulting, consultant life, tech consulting, management consulting, IT consulting, consulting insights, management consulting insights, how to become a consultant, pros and cons of consulting, reality of consulting, it consulting, big 4 consulting, why i quit consulting, consulting work life balance, consulting working hours

Id: Dfvrt-3IAxU

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021