Dear Jonathan, Many of my friends are applying for management consultancy jobs, but if the industry is shrinking, what’s Plan B?
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Dear Jonathan,
Many of my friends are applying for management consultancy jobs which seems a really popular choice. I did the Oxford Strategy Challenge and some other consulting-related events and am quite interested in this as a first job but now I’m reading that the companies are downsizing and using AI instead.
What’s Plan B?
Management consultancy, or rather developing and applying consulting skills, is a popular career choice with Oxford students: the problems can be intellectually challenging, time is short and pressured, you work with similar people, and you get well rewarded (albeit for long hours and a somewhat disrupted life). Unlike other popular sectors such as law, medicine, and financial services, there are no exams to pass or national bodies to revalidate your fitness to practice.
It does appear to be the case that the traditional consulting firms, whether pure strategy houses or large multi-functional groups, are implementing AI to take on much of the raw analysis work. It’s early days and firms seem to be still evaluating how much analyst capacity is needed, so entry-level graduate hiring is stalling in places.
The emerging power of AI to produce foundational analyses for any consulting assignment, e.g. a strategic review, an operational improvement programme, or a product evaluation, is also available to the organisations themselves at low/no cost. We may see organisations start to manage their “consulting” programmes in-house: they can hire entry-level graduates with some basic consulting skills (such as you have from one or more of the programmes that Careers runs), and maybe an experienced mid-career consultant, to bring the work in-house. While this might not yield all the external information a consultant can bring, it avoids high fees, develops capability in-house, uses people who actually know the business, and most importantly, engages people who will stay to implement their recommendations.
So if you are interested in consulting skills, and developing your career in an organisation or specific industry sector, plan B could be to build your skills e.g. through Careers’ Insight into Consulting, or relevant student societies, and apply to organisations where you’d be able to apply these skills – for example, in mission-led enterprises (e.g. charities), retail, local or national government.
Jonathan Black - Director, Careers, University of Oxford
Read more guidance on the Consultancy sector and alternatives.
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For six years, the Careers Director at the University of Oxford, Jonathan Black, wrote a fortnightly column for the Financial Times answering readers’ careers questions - you can still find it here.
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