What a rapid career: Britta Fünfstück had just been working for two years as a junior consultant for the strategy consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) when, during a project, Siemens Group offered the then 27-year-old a change of sides. As a strategy consultant, she had participated in developing the concept for the global e-business initiative of Siemens Healthcare. Shortly thereafter, she managed as a Siemens employee the e-business project in Germany and subsequently won her spurs as marketing manager and M&A chief strategist in Siemens healthcare division.
Today, Fünfstück is 37 years old and CEO of one of the most promising medical technology fields of the Group: The ex-consultant manages the business with molecular imaging technology, a staff of about 2,500, as well as research and distribution facilities all over the world. "It's only at top strategy consultancies that you are so early on already assigned to find solutions to the most difficult questions which companies may ask", says the graduated physicist. "At BCG, I was able to train what managers should have mastered: Going into the depth at the right point in time without losing sight of the big whole, thus even diametrically opposed developments."
Britta Fünfstück's entrance into the consultancy field was a career accelerator. She was among the most brilliant five percent of her year which major strategy consultancies fight over on the market. McKinsey, BCG and a few others shell out up to € 80,000 as the annual starting salary for top talents. These major strategy consultancies bill daily fees of € 3,000 per consultant in good times; they pick up the real gems on the graduates market and offer them all consultancy fields from strategy to implementation under the same roof.
But even those who don't manage to land a job with the well-known major companies can climb fast on the career ladder via the consultancy sector: Germany has about 13,200 consultancies; among them many small and medium-sized all-rounders as well as specialized players in niches. "Nowhere else is the learning curve as steep, and nowhere else can college and university graduates experience so many different corporate cultures and projects in the shortest period of time", says Dietmar Fink, Managing Director of the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Management und Beratung (WGMB – Scientific Company for Management and Consulting).
Working like a cart horse for three years
But before their great career, most high fliers must first toil night and day for three or four years and prepare PowerPoint presentations for senior consultants. "As a consultant, you'll jump again and again into cold water: always new clients, new industries, new project teams and always new contents", says Carolin Reichert who had been strategy consultant with Roland Berger for six years and today works for the energy provider RWE in Essen where she is responsible for the business all around the subject of e-mobility. "When you are constantly in uncharted waters, you'll learn to take it all in your stride."
Reichert decided on swimming and she is convinced today that her work at the strategy consulting company provided her with the tenacity, her absolute will to succeed, also her confidence in her own abilities and her courage to tackle new things. Because the performance pressure is high at most major consultancies. After all, they work like a classical structural distributor: Juniors earn the money for the senior consultants – and in the end, only the most successful consultants are allowed to stay on board. Accordingly, at least three quarters of one graduate year will give up jobs as consultants after five years at the latest.
So that everything will work well career-wise, any prospective applicant should do some serious thinking about which consultancy area would fit his or her personality – even well before going into the application marathon. Because the one consultant job does not exist. "Purchasing consultants will need entirely different skills than a change management expert or a restructuring consultant", says Klaus Reiners, spokesman for the Bundesverband Deutscher Unternehmensberater (BDU – Federal Association of German Management Consultants). To facilitate the decision-making process for graduates and junior consultants concerning their direction to take, WirtschaftsWoche jointly with the BDU and WGMB in Bonn identified the most important consultancy fields and listed which special technical background and which personality traits and penchants are in demand in the corresponding field.
Management or Base?
Entrants in that field of work should ask themselves this first crucial question: Do I prefer to work from the top down or from the base up? Those who very much want to create their own business models and develop large-scale strategy concepts must feel comfortable as a consultant on the board and managing director level. Such vital decisions can only be enforced from top to bottom in the corporate hierarchy.
In contrast, strategy consultants and M&A specialists must be able to live with the fact that the staff of their corporate clients will rather face them with distrust and little sympathy. They will hear more frequently the jaundiced statement that consultants are arrogant, cold, and mere "number crunchers" – i.e. people living in a world of numbers without any empathy.
The intellectual reward for that image: "As a strategy consultant, you'll live very much in the future. It's simply great fun to work in a team with many smart people on product strategies which will only become reality in five to ten years", Jasmin Müller is raving about it. She is a 26-year-old business management graduate who, two years ago, started work with the management consultancy Arthur D. Little which specializes in technology and innovation.
It's altogether different when processes are supposed to be optimized or streamlined and the consultant accordingly will depend on being accepted by his client's staff. Thus, process and organizational consultants must be primarily good communicators. They will be able to handle their implementation projects much more easily if they appreciate team work and need not let other people feel their assumed superiority.
"If you want to consult medium-sized companies on solid purchasing subjects, you must also speak their language – you'll get nowhere with intellectual gyrations", also says Gerd Kerkhoff, for example, of the Düsseldorf-based purchasing consultancy Kerkhoff Consulting. His strategy in selecting applicants is thus: "We don't just need candidates with top grades but people who are competent in their special field and who are well grounded." Accordingly, good implementation consultants usually bring in a few years of job experience elsewhere, they radiate special competence and no longer need to maintain their position through cockfights or a know-it-all attitude.
It's best to test
But across all consultancy areas, there is the great charm of the self-test: "Starting your career life as a consultant is to decide that you don't make a decision for the time being", says Ansgar Richter, Professor for Strategy and Organization at the European Business School in Wiesbaden. Industrial employers feel rather snubbed when their young hopefuls leave them already after three, four years. But in the consultancy sector, it's part of the business model that juniors will leave to go to other companies. "Especially in major strategy firms, there is still a strict up-or-out principle", says Frank Höselbarth, personnel consultant from Frankfurt. Those who can't make it to the top fast enough will just have to go. But at the same time, top firms also inform their junior consultants via Intranet about vacant positions at their clients' and thus indirectly take care that their alumni might possibly return as clients again at some future time.
And sometimes breaks or fallow periods in a curriculum vitae are even an advantage – for example in the sector of reorganizers and restructurers. "People who restructure companies will meet people who must deal intensively with the subject of failure", says Burkhard Jung, Chairman of the Board of the management consultancy CMS in Berlin specializing in reorganization and insolvency management. Jung finds applicants exciting who dropped out of their studies or quit an unloved job, picked themselves up again and then successfully go their very own way. "A consultant who knows this experience personally and is able to communicate that you can get out of such situations will just be perfect in our business." |
