Consulting Career - A Balanced Review.

Let me try to do an objective assessment of consulting as a career as I have gone through the entire "Consider,Interesting,Not-for-me" Cycle. Luckily for me, I did go through it long before recruitment season started unlike for some who did it well after spending a couple of years in the career. Consulting is meant for a an elite group of individuals. In the words of a McKinsey senior partner it is "Individuals who are always aspiring to improve and are EXTREMELY INSECURE" about themselves. Consultants are also individuals with extreme political savvyness. They are "happy go lucky", eternal optimists, outside in (always receptive to feedback), and risk averse (on a relative note lets say compared to the other end of the spectrum of entrepreneurs). Now that is a lot of personality traits. As you rightly guessed that is a very detailed "Personality profile". Now there are a lot of individuals who disguise to be this person and make it into consulting. Please note that a business school like INSEAD has as many personality types as there are as there are MBA participants. So when the consultants come with a template to verify the number of people that fit, everyone squeezes and begs and acts attempting to fit the template. Very few naturally fit. The consulting companies add an "artificial barrier" to the individuals by adding "uniqueness factors" about themselves (That in reality is very marginal compared to the overall personality required) to make it even more difficult for the "aspirant". But some beat the system, some naturally fit in. Either ways, both parties are happy with the combination as the business model revolves around "churn".

So now, what does one have to take into account? Personality. If you have the personality, you will end up in consulting without trying (because in all liklihood others would hate you and you won't care about why mediocrity hates you). If you don't, you can try (if you are smart enough to get into a top school, it means you have already pretended enough ;).

Hope that answers your question wannabe. But remember I am an outsider talking about consulting. Thats a consultants job not mine :)