Meet Sid, a Senior Manager in London

my name is Syd I'm a consultant at Bain I joined just over a year ago and before that I did four years in Investment Banking and prior to that I did an economics degree at the University of Edinburgh after four years in banking your learning curve starts to flatten quite quickly and the difference between what you're doing and what your boss is doing is really there's not that much of a gap and you start to feel okay am I really learning that much here so the reason I decided to pursue a career in consulting was that it offers I think a much broader spectrum of exit opportunities and in terms of the skills I learned on a day to day basis something so broad that it's very difficult for that learning curve to flatten anytime soon I feel like every day I'm doing something here it's something I'm completely out of my depth with so I don't have to worry about that learning curve flattening out anytime soon my favorite work at Bain has been work in the private equity ring-fence and for those of you don't know what that is that's basically where we do due diligence is for private equity companies looking to buy various assets the reason I find it so interesting is that effectively the timelines are shortened versus normal cases and you're doing raw strategy work where you're trying to assess the commercial viability of companies in the market and you do that all over a two to three week time frame as opposed to a three to four month time frame which makes it at times very stressful but also very very exciting and it really improves the team dynamics that you get when I joined Bain I joined as a senior associate consultant which is the level you typically achieve after two years if you were to join as a graduate so it was getting at the beginning adjusted to the Bain way of doing things the way that people here like to work the people the way that people like to have their output getting used to that was quite difficult and so coming in at that level was actually good because it allowed me to concentrate on learning those things since then though in a year I've progressed to the level of consultant which is more in line with the level I was pre I was previously holding in banking and with that of course the responsibilities you hold increase you start to have to manage team members you start to have to think about the overall answer the we'll output more you're not just dealing with individual small pieces of work you're really part of figuring out what the conclusion of the work is I specialized in technology before joining Bain specifically software and I was looking at a lot of different companies as a research analyst in the software space in Europe that's a specialization I never really wanted to give up and I wanted to progress when I joined Bain initially the view was given to me that it's going to be quite difficult to keep a specialization because we're a generalist firm however as I moved into the private equity practice where there is a lot of software work the partners there were very receptive to the fact that there is someone with four years of pure software experience and they've really been supportive in allowing me to pursue that specialization staffing me specifically on software deals allowing me to do a lot of the client development work we do around software so I've really been able to continue to build that area of specialization at Bain outside of our role we have what we call an extra 10% which is various activities that you can pursue outside of your core job in my case what I'm doing is industry recruiting what I feel passionate about industry recruiting is that I don't feel that it was 100 cent optimal when I joined Bain as an industry recruit and I think there's a lot of things especially around helping people candidates understand what the environment is going to be like what their roadmap of progression is going to be like that we can still do a much better job on and for me it's very important to work as part of that since I had to go through that in the first place

Channel: Bain & Company Careers

Views: 29,958

Rating: 4.9053764 out of 5

Keywords: recruiting profiles, working with bain, youtubecareers, career at bain, london profiles, sid mehra

Id: UD-e_a0xUKs

Length: 3min 53sec (233 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018