MBA Management Consulting Job Description
Consultants are hired as advisors to corporations. They tackle a
wide variety of business problems and provide solutions for their
clients. Depending on the size and chosen strategy of the firm,
these problems can be as straightforward as researching a new market
or as complex as totally rethinking the client's organization,
including whether to acquire a related company worth hundreds of
millions of dollars or how to reduce the size of their work force by
thousands of employees. Firms cover the scope from strategy, where
only advice and direction are provided, to implementation, where
firms actually work with the client to implement recommendations.
The work of consulting is data collection and analysis. Consultants
add value by collecting information that is hard to get - often by
pulling it out of people's heads and then analyzing it in a way that
defines attractive ways to solve managerial and competitive
problems.
By and large, the things people like about consulting are similar
across the board. They like the variety of working in different
industries and functional areas for many different clients and the
intellectual challenge of pushing themselves to the limit as they
tackle complex business problems.
Strategy Consulting
Focuses on providing top executive officers in Fortune 500
companies with strategic or operational advice. For that, they get
paid the highest fees and have the most prestige. Although some
firms differentiate themselves by specializing in particular
industries or functions, most strategy consultants tend to be
generalists who work on a wide variety of projects and industries.
Such firms include Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen &
Hamilton and McKinsey.
General Management Consulting
Provides a wide range of services depending on client needs.
These services include strategic advice, information systems
support, cost control, productivity enhancement, activity-based
costing, competitive analysis, marketing strategy and many others.
Most of these firms have a recognized expertise in business process
reengineering. Such firms include: Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst &
Young, Deloitte Consulting, BearingPoint, PwC, Diamond Cluster, IBM
Business Consulting Services and Scott Madden.
Boutique Strategy Consulting
Includes a significant subgroup of firms that have chosen to
specialize in a particular industry, process, or a specialized type
of consulting. These firms are typically smaller and work with a
more specialized group of clients. Such firms include: Kurt Salmon,
CSC Index, North Highland Group, and Doblin Group, among others.
Human Resource Consulting Firms like Towers Perrin, The Hay
Group, William Mercer, and Hewitt Consulting fall into this category
because they all focus on the specialty area of human resources.
Technology & Systems Consulting
Focus on designing, implementing, and/or managing the information
and computer systems for their clients. This may require everything
from analyzing the client's informational needs, to acquiring new
hardware systems, to writing computer code to running the new
system. Such firms include: SAP and Keane Consulting Group.
Description for jobs in consulting:
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