McKinsey & Company Any advice to help prepare for data science analyst role at top consulting firms (McKinsey & Company EY Boston Consulting Group etc)? Any materials, open source platform recommended to take on freelance data science project? When should I start actively looking and applying? I am a new grad who is working in tech as a marketing analyst I’m looking to pivot to marketing& sales data science consulting next year. Would like someone with similar backgrounds offer some practical tips.
There’s nothing special about these firm’s data science programs, so you don’t need to constrain your search to specifically looking for BBM DS prep materials for the core skills (interviews may be a different story).
I’d suggest looking at a master’s program. Alternatively you could look at Andre Ng’s courses on (coursera? Udemy? I don’t recall which), but it’s going to be a serious uphill battle to get into a DS role in consulting without experience or academic credentials. A recent study by Burtchworks showed that >90% of data scientists have a master’s or Ph.D (split fairly evenly), so that is who you are competing with.
Look into DS newsletters. Classes and books give you the state of the art from 2 years ago, including the fundamentals which is very important. Newsletters are where you learn about the real cutting edge stuff, as well as gaining different perspectives on analysis techniques. You’ll also find that there is a massive array of techniques out there, but you won’t learn most of them in school or classes because they’re only applicable in certain uncommon edge cases. I’m two years into my master’s program and I have yet to hear about a [one-armed] bandit algorithm- but I learned about those from the door dash engineering blog (highly recommend subscribing). I’ve also learned a lot from the Towards Data Science newsletter- it was enough to warrant a subscription ( which was like $5/month… it’s worth the investment in yourself). Data elixer is another common one but I haven’t read it much myself.
In your current job, look for places you can apply programming and statistics. I started as an analyst and learned coding by automating everything in my workflow I could possibly automate, then ysing all of that free time to introduce statistics where I could. These projects can go on your resume and will help with the experience and credential gap.
You may also consider an intermediate role where you are a DS at a firm in another industry and then apply to BBM. This helps with the experience gap.
Good luck.
Thank you so much!! Could I DM you with some further questions?
Hi, I’m actually in the interview process for a consulting position (with data science) at McKinsey. The process, so far (got first technical homework + 1st technical interview) is very similar to other firms around, although, if I’ll manage to pass the 2 technical interviews, the recruitment process will turn into a pure consulting recruitment, with multiple case studies and interview.
Feel free to ask any question if needed!
Sure