Consulting for Fresh Graduates
Well, not every job is meant for everyone, especially because people look for different things out of a job. And not many have the appetite for Consulting either. But before fresh graduates and young professionals write off Consulting based on hearsay, here’s my take on why you should pause and reconsider.
As fresh graduates, we think we know what buzz words like Product Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Business Intelligence Engineer, Data Analyst etc. mean and entail. And of course there are so many other roles we haven’t even heard of at the age of 22.
Because consulting firms extend their skilled employees to their client firms on a project-to-project engagement basis, you are expected to wear multiple hats in your engagements. And you might dismiss the idea of it because you feel like you know what you want to do already, so why invest time in doing things that may not tie closely to your role.
I, for one, believe that is super beneficial for anybody in the early stages of their career, and for reasons more than one.
- You don’t know what you haven’t experienced.
You might be a business analyst by role at your engagement, but you might be performing the duties of a Product Manager. You might be a Product Manager having have to draw up wireframes or screen mock-ups. You might be an application developer being asked to review or update wireframes. Or, you might have to help out with some technical decision making in the absence of a full time dedicated resource. And who knows, amidst all of this — you might realize you have a liking and flare for a role that isn’t the one you’re primarily delivering on.
Yes, the boundaries of the role you perform are blurry, but it is great for someone who wants to explore and find out what they like doing the most.
2. Your engagement with various teams is much more tightly knit.
Why is that a great thing, well, besides the fact that it means better collaboration?
It gives you a better visibility into the roles other team members perform. It gives you the opportunity to passively observe and learn from how they deliver on their roles.
They will ask you questions you as an analyst might be able to help them with, for them to perform and deliver on their role. But you learn what the right questions to ask would be, if you were to perform that role.
And you subconsciously think to yourself: If I were to perform that role, would I enjoy doing that?
3. Your existing skill set grows at an accelerated pace.
We all, as fresh graduates, have asked this question How To Gain Experience For A Job That Requires Experience, and sighed to ourselves with frustration.
Surprise: Well, it’s not just your first job where you are asked for experience. Your next job switch will also ask you for relevant experience.
For example, you are a business analyst, looking to make a switch to a Product or Project Management role (both of them are quite different from one another even though they are used interchangeably sometimes). As a business analyst consultant, you will have performed both these roles in some capacity or the other and drawing examples of such instances demonstrate your capabilities.
Consulting will help you exercise various skill muscles on the job and prepare you for a wide range of roles.
4. Your communication and presentation skills improve in many ways.
Well, this term can be loosely used but what I mean by improved communication and presentation skills goes slightly beyond the ability to deliver your speech efficiently. You also learn how to gauge your audience — ability to comprehend their appetite for content consumption, ability to read what points strike a chord with them and elaborate on those, ability to give them what they might be looking for without them having have to ask for it.
More importantly, it prepares you for impromptu pitches, conversations and interactions. Even the best of speakers are great at rehearsed delivery but find unplanned ones a little challenging.
Overall, it prepares you to learn how to engage people and that is an undervalued skill most of us aren’t taught.
5. You have the freedom to experience/ explore different industries.
You always have the opportunity to experience different industries, and figure out what sector appeals to you and resonates with you the most — finance, tech, health-care, renewable energy, cyber security and beyond.
This is not to say that there are no cons (some of them may even be strong enough reasons to walk away from it), but often, the pros get lost under all the memes circulating over social media. We are often forced in life to make decisions with the limited knowledge and information available to us, I hope this helps in some well-thought and considered decision making.
