How to get the most out of your consulting experience
When I sent my farewell email at McKinsey on my last working day in late August 2026, after completing 4 years at the firm, I was surprised by how difficult it was to write. It was not really about sentimental reasons, though maybe there was some of that too. It was more that looking back at my journey there, I realized how many different experiences I had gone through and how many amazing people I had worked with, and it was hard to fit all of that into a few words.
McKinsey was not the first place I worked, but it was one of the most formative professional experiences I have had. After graduating from IIT Kharagpur, I started my career with Unilever in supply chain and manufacturing. Unilever gave me a perfect playground to learn the fundamentals of business, see sophisticated business processes, lead large teams, and drive execution on large projects, including building and operationalizing a new manufacturing plant from scratch. Unilever taught me execution, but I wanted to understand how organizations decided what to focus on in the first place. So, after 5 years of professional experience and with a bit more confidence, I decided to pursue an MBA at Yale School of Management. At Yale, I was fortunate to receive multiple offers, and when the time came to choose, I picked McKinsey for a fairly odd reason: I did not understand what consultants actually did, and this felt like my chance to find out.
Coming into consulting from core operations, as someone who had spent more time on factory shopfloors than in front of PowerPoint slides, I was skeptical that consultants actually drove value, and I was not confident I would last past my first review cycle. Consulting, especially at McKinsey, is notorious for being hyper competitive, ruthlessly meritocratic, professionally elite, and extremely intense. But once I started, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I survive, looking back, I thrived over those 4 years, and they helped me grow both as a business professional and as a person.
If I had to narrow down the things I loved in those 4 years at McKinsey into 3 things, these would be it:
1. Knowing how to build deep professional relationships: Consulting is an extremely people-centric business. To deliver results effectively, you need to work well with colleagues and learn how to collaborate with clients. As you keep moving from one project to another, working with different team members and clients, earning trust and building close relationships quickly becomes second nature. Since I began working in consulting, I have been surprised at how quickly I got comfortable around new people, and how I can now have a meaningful conversation with almost anyone.
2. Building comfort with ambiguity: Most projects, if not all, carry a certain degree of ambiguity. That comes from a few different places: the client has not fully articulated their vision or ask, there is not enough data to answer questions with confidence, and sometimes the problem statement itself shifts as you uncover new insights along the way. What stays constant is that value still needs to get delivered, and it needs to get delivered fast. Working through these situations builds the muscle every consultant needs: how to clearly define and articulate goals, build hypotheses using first-principles problem solving, a fancy term for just applying common sense, and test those hypotheses with a minimal set of data. This is one of the skills that helps people with a consulting background succeed well beyond the industry.
3. Getting cool experiences: Consulting throws you into very different situations depending on the project, and a lot of the time that leads to genuinely cool experiences. One project took me to rural Idaho and Montana, driving between stores across the state, and I got to see the real countryside and heartland of the US. Another took me to West Palm Beach, where we ran our final readout in the home office of our client’s CEO. Some of these experiences also come from teams that like to work hard and play hard. Team events led me to 2 NBA games, dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants, and visits to most major cities in the country. In just 4 years, I built up more of these memorable experiences than I think I could have anywhere else.
That said, not every part of the job is rosy, and a consulting career can be genuinely challenging. Here are a few aspects I did not enjoy:
1. Taxing travel: Most consulting projects, especially at firms like McKinsey, require the team to be at the client site or co-located at an office. It is extremely difficult to have every project based out of your home city, so travel becomes unavoidable. Traveling every week, Monday through Thursday and sometimes Friday too, sounds fun in theory, but it takes a real physical toll, demands personal sacrifices, and can lead to faster burnout.
2. Every interaction is evaluative: Consulting firms promise to bring their best and brightest to clients, and that shows up in every meeting, whether with the client or internally with firm leadership. Consultants are expected to bring sharply defined perspectives, communicated effectively, every single time. Even one interaction where a client or a firm leader feels you were not prepared enough can cost you trust and credibility. This pressure does make you a sharper professional, but the constant weight of it also takes a toll on you mentally and physically.
3. Things beyond your control can still affect you: Like in most organizations, there are plenty of factors outside your control that affect your growth and even your survival at the firm, and that can leave you feeling less secure than you would like most of the time. Industry slowdowns, sponsors leaving the firm, clients cancelling projects, or simply a lack of a clearly defined value proposition can all mean you do not get staffed, and that can eventually push you out the door, whether you want it to or not.
With its upsides and downsides, consulting is a genuinely interesting and often misunderstood. Through this article, I want to try to demystify it a bit: what working at a top consulting firm involves, and how to succeed there. My hope is that people exploring a career in consulting can use this to decide whether it is worth pursuing, and that people who have already decided to join can use it as a bit of a guide on how to make the most of it.
What is consulting and what should you expect?
Consulting is a broad term that covers a lot of different kinds of businesses. Here I am specifically talking about management consulting.
So, what do management consulting firms actually do? In simple terms, they advise the leadership of an organization on business strategy and value delivery. Put another way, they work with top leaders on two things: the strategy side, which means defining goals and priorities for the organization, and the value delivery side, which means identifying the initiatives that will help realize that strategy and working with the client’s teams to implement them.
Every project looks a little different, but the essence stays the same. Let me walk through a couple of examples of the kind of work a management consulting firm might take on.
Project 1: Helping the chief procurement officer of an industrial company deliver $250M+ in savings
What this involved:
• Diligence and blueprinting: Our team quickly understood the spend landscape, where the company was spending and why, ran a set of fundamental analyses such as benchmarking and trend analysis, and built a data-backed view of where the biggest procurement opportunities were and where to focus.
• Identifying initiatives: Once the blueprint was aligned with senior leadership, we worked closely with the client’s teams to dig into the highest priority spend areas, going as deep as purchase-order level in some cases, running workshops, and putting together a comprehensive set of initiatives that could actually move the needle. Example initiatives included renegotiating rates with transportation providers in the Northeast and consolidating shipments by dispatching less frequently to improve truck utilization.
• Supporting implementation: Once the initiatives were identified, we worked alongside the client to actually implement them, running detailed analysis, preparing negotiation asks, posture, and tactics, and helping the client get ready for these conversations.
While management consulting firms were traditionally known more for the blueprinting side, firms today increasingly work with clients across the full life cycle, from blueprinting all the way through implementation.
Project 2: Helping a retailer unlock $1B+ in value across its stores
What this involved:
• Diagnosing current processes: Our team spent time in stores observing and understanding how things worked, diagnosing metrics, and identifying the operational inefficiencies driving lost sales or extra spend.
• Piloting initiatives: Once we had identified the most critical pain points, we worked with the client to pilot changes at select stores, measure the impact, and formalize the changes that could be replicated across the rest of the chain.
• Scaling nationally: Once we had established impact at the pilot stores, we worked with the client to build a change management plan to scale it across 2,000+ stores and worked alongside them to train employees.
Based on these two examples, you can probably see the common thread: every project involves understanding the client’s vision, building hypotheses about where the opportunity lies, refining that view based on evidence, and creating an actionable execution plan.
Now that you know what the projects look like, let me talk about the kinds of skills a consultant needs to bring to the table.
1. Structuring the problem: Breaking the problem statement down into steps that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive is critical. It tells you what actions you need to take to test a hypothesis and makes sure you are covering all the critical pieces.
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2. Knowing the fundamentals of business: A consultant does not need to be an industry expert or an economist, but understanding the fundamentals of business is key to solving problems well. Understanding competitive forces, the basics of finance, and core operations concepts, for example, goes a long way toward finding the best solution.
3. Testing hypotheses: This might be the single most important skill a consultant needs, so let me spend a bit more time on it. Testing a hypothesis means collecting proof points to figure out whether your recommendation is right or not. It would be easier to just call it analyzing data, but I want to stress that testing hypotheses can be quantitative, qualitative, or both. Sometimes that means running complicated analysis on large data sets to find patterns and trends. Sometimes it means visiting ground operations and observing them closely. And sometimes it means interviewing experts, consumers, or clients directly. Each of these draws on a different strength, and every consultant is expected to build a strong point of view in the most efficient way to test a given hypothesis. Sometimes a handful of interviews is more effective than a week of analysis. That is why a consultant needs to be comfortable being a smooth talker when the moment calls for pulling information out of people, and just as comfortable becoming a data whiz when the moment calls for building a complicated model.
4. Crafting the story and communicating it so people are convinced: Coming up with the solution is only one part of the job. The more critical step is building a compelling, easy to understand story and communicating it to executives so they actually agree with your perspective. The deep, complicated analysis you spent 16-hour days on for a week can become completely futile if it is not communicated in a way that busy executives, who do not have time to absorb every nuance, can understand quickly and clearly. If they cannot see why your solution is the right one, or at least an optimal one, they may lose trust in your recommendation and ask for more analysis, or simply redirect your focus to something else that may not actually be the right call. This is why consultants spend so much time on PowerPoint. Building a good business document is not just about having nice icons and color-coordinated boxes. It is about bringing out a powerful, data-backed, coherent story that is easy to follow.
Now that I have covered the skills, the next question is what is actually expected of a consultant. Having the skills is not enough on its own to succeed, and honestly, everyone keeps building on these skills throughout their time at the firm. That said, here are a few things that are expected of consultants:
1. The right attitude: This applies to every company and every industry, and consulting is no exception. Leaders want people on their team who bring the kind of attitude that earns trust. It is hard to define exactly what the right attitude looks like, but the best traits I looked for in consultants I staffed were sincerity about delivering and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the results.
2. Being fast: Projects in consulting can be as short as 4 weeks, and you need to show results fast. In timelines that tight, ramping up quickly and forming a point of view early is critical. You are not expected to become an industry expert in your first week, but you are expected to quickly digest the fundamental background and become dangerous enough to start forming a perspective.
3. Being proactive: This is what separates a great consultant from a good one. A great consultant always keeps an eye on the end goal of their workstream, anticipates the next steps, and works proactively toward them instead of waiting for instructions from the project leader. McKinsey in particular expects consultants to start showing this trait within their first few projects, and after 6 months at the firm, to be able to go standalone, meaning manage their own workstream with minimal supervision.
How should you shape your consulting journey?
Now that I have covered what is expected, let me talk about how to shape your own journey. The beauty, and the slightly scary part, of consulting is that everyone’s journey ends up looking different, and you have real say in shaping yours, at least to a certain extent.
To make the most of your time in consulting, there are 2 areas worth focusing on.
Area 1: Crushing the consulting toolkit
The consulting toolkit, or the skills I described above, is not just essential to succeed at the firm. It is also expected of you if you decide to leave for another organization down the line. You can be great at one skill and just good at another, but it is important not to have real gaps in any of them. So, the first priority for any consultant deciding where to focus is simple: give your best on the projects you are staffed on, keep seeking feedback from your project leaders, and steadily close the gaps in your toolkit. For some people that takes 3 months, for others 6. How long it takes does not really matter. What matters is that your daily work is steadily closing those gaps.
Area 2: Solving for your medium to long term goal
Working on your toolkit is the baseline expectation for delivering well on your projects, but navigating the firm is equally important in shaping your journey. When I say navigating the firm, that can mean a number of things, but the most critical pieces come down to: who you want to work with, what you want to work on, and what kind of growth curve you are after. That is why there are a few questions every consultant should be asking themselves regularly.
What is my goal at the firm?
It is worth being honest with yourself about whether your goal in joining the firm is to expedite your growth or to pivot into a particular industry or function afterward. How you navigate the firm can change quite a bit depending on the answer. Here are the 2 broad types of goals you can solve for:
• Expedited growth (for example, becoming an EM in under 2 years, or Partner in under 5): If this is your main goal, do not be too choosy about the type of projects you take. Instead, focus on doubling down on your sponsorship network and your track record at the firm to seek out step-up opportunities. Expedited growth often comes at the cost of breadth and can push you towards an early industry or functional alignment. This path tends to suit people looking to reach leadership roles in the corporate world faster, without worrying too much about the specific kind of work they do along the way.
• Industry or functional pivot (for example, leaving McKinsey for a specific industry or function): Say you come from a manufacturing background but want to pivot into growth roles at a tech company, something like a GTM lead role. In that case, your focus should shift away from chasing growth opportunities and toward networking with leaders in the relevant practice to find the right staffing opportunities. This can be harder depending on the pipeline of projects available, and it means performing well on whatever you are staffed on, so project leads know you have a strong toolkit, while also building relationships with leaders in those sectors, both functional and industry leaders are worth knowing, so you are top of mind when the right opportunity opens up. This path might mean slower growth in the near term, but it can set you up well for the long run.
You might be thinking, why not both? That is a fair question, and there are people who have managed to do both. But at the risk of sounding preachy, professional life is a balancing act, and knowing your primary goal matters most when time comes to make trade-offs.
Who do I want to work with at the firm?
Once your goals have narrowed down the broad set of people worth working with, the next question is who specifically you want sponsorship from. In case you are wondering what sponsorship means, at McKinsey it comes down to finding leaders who are willing to invest in you, and who you are willing to invest in as well. In simpler terms, who do you want to work with often? Every leader has different traits that resonate differently depending on your own working style. Some leaders are intense and will push you to give your best, while others are more relaxed and give you a lot of leeway in how you approach your work. The former usually means more stressful projects but faster learning, and the latter usually means a slower learning curve but a better work-life balance. It is worth doing your own diligence on leaders, talking to people around you and figuring out who you will genuinely enjoy working with based on your own style, so you can invest more of your time with them. And if it feels a little uncomfortable to be doing due diligence on people like this, do not worry about it. They are doing the same thing about you.
What skills do I want to be known for?
To answer this, you have to sit with the question honestly: what skill do you want to be known for? I have always enjoyed analyzing data and thrived on projects that involved building large, complicated models. So, if there was one skill I wanted to be known for, it was being the person who could handle anything involving data. Across every project, I made a point of raising my hand to build models, learn new tools for analyzing data, things like Tableau and Python, and translate messy analysis into executive-level recommendations. Through that consistent pattern, my sponsors came to see this as one of my real strengths, and I became the person people thought of first when a data-heavy problem came up. Consulting is one of the few places where you get the chance to flex and sharpen almost any valuable professional skill across nearly every project, and that benefits you well beyond consulting, in any organization you go on to work for.
So, should you join consulting?
This is a genuinely difficult question to answer, mostly because there is no single right answer. What is a bit easier to answer is who consulting is probably not the right fit for.
So here is my take. Consulting is probably not right for you if:
• You are looking for work-life balance: Some projects have better work-life balance than others, but the truth is that consulting does not really have a concept of a standard 9-to-5, and there is no real way to escape the intensity of the lifestyle. Work rarely stops, and most people at these firms get so used to that pace that it becomes genuinely hard to seek out balance, even when the people around you are the ones eager to keep working.
• You want complete agency over the work you do: You will never have full control over the kind of work you get to do. The projects you end up staffed on depend a lot on what is available at the time. You can work towards projects aligned with your goals, but you cannot be too selective, since low utilization can get you asked to leave.
• You want steadiness in your life: Consulting means constant change. Your client, team leaders, colleagues, location, and problem statement will all keep shifting from project to project, which can make life feel less steady than you would like. There have been so many instances where I really enjoyed working with someone on a project and then never got the chance to work with them again. When I was at Unilever, I got to spend much longer stretches of time with colleagues, long enough that many of them became genuine friends I would hang out with outside of work. That almost never happens in consulting.
• You do not enjoy stress: Consulting is stressful. Deadlines are harsh, deliverables can feel unreasonable, undesirable feedback is common, and feeling inadequate comes with the territory. If you are not looking to live under near-constant stress, consulting is probably not for you.
Final words
Through this article, I wanted to share my honest, personal take on consulting in as complete a way as I could. I am sure some of my colleagues would see things differently, and that is fine. There are plenty of people who have had a great experience in consulting, and I count myself lucky to be one of them, and plenty who have had a genuinely difficult experience, through no fault of their own. What most people would probably agree on is that consulting pushes you out of your comfort zone and tests your limits, day after day.
