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"post_content": "Industry hires (not straight out of school) into consulting- what are the biggest challenges you are facing/faced? How did you overcome them? At what point did you start to feel comfortable? Mine for example, is being fast at building slides and beautifying them. Managing firm building activities and project work leading to long hours (>15), no wlb. Im four months in and still feel incredibly new.",
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I’m an L7 experienced hire, joined 2 years ago and started an EH networking group for this reason. We have about 300 people who connect to network, share resources, staff and look for roles, and answer “dumb” questions you may not want to ask homegrown colleagues. DM me with your EID of your like to be connected!
I am curious because I am interested in transitioning to consulting from industry and implementation— what do you see as the most challenging about building slides? Also do you get trained on delivery? I have a communications background and it still took me a while to feel comfortable. And each customer seems to have different expectations.
People are very particular about how they want to see things. And every team you work with will have a changing preference. This makes it very challenging.
I find the building and condensing data to be more challenging, communication after that Iv found is easier
Pro
Being thrown in with little to no guidance on what to do as a project lead.
Yes biggest!!
Chief
Not caring about detail and practicality of the recommendations.
D3… THIS. I hated decks in industry and we barely used them and design tools were fine. Now, everything is on a deck. Oh, you have an idea? Put it on a deck. But make sure that the slides are perfect before socializing the idea at all. Oh and it’s probably best to put that in table format. Make sure you put it in excel too. No, no, no don’t use tableau to convert into a gantt chart! Just use manually created ppt shapes! No don’t use the timeline plug in that does all that for you! Use shapes! Did you update your deck and your excel tables? Yes we have to have both and no you can’t just work out of excel until it’s time to put together the final deliverable. Per my last email, we need both!
Yep. Slide building was tough for me. Got in the groove after about 6 months.
The partnership and director politics. They’re incentivized to sell and tangentially incentivized to do good work for repeat business, but that often times conflicts with the clients best interest, and anyone at staff level gets caught in the cross-hairs
That’s interesting, hadn’t considered from that perspective
Slide work has been tough for me too but continually working on it. Biggest problem for me though is that I was jaded in industry and that makes me super jaded here. People take themselves too seriously here and it’s hard to work with a few peeps because of their competitive natures
People are disconnected and don’t understand the internal struggles of being in industry. Also, Billing hours is a pain. You will never feel comfortable and that’s for everyone. People use a fake it til you make it mentality. Just follow your gut, more than likely you’re doing a good job.
Campus hire 23 years ago…I’m still not comfortable much of the time so agree with the point above.
Big challenge: outranking people who spend far more time in consulting and know more about the day-to-day. My solution was to stick to an industry where my expertise gives me enough of an edge 😅
Exactly! Tried to get my content contributions to be seen as my value add while working on the side to get better at the basics like slide writing.
Now that I’m 2 years in, my biggest challenge is dealing with the fallout of me initially being bad at slide building. Took me about 8 months to master and I’m highly skilled now, but people seem to only have this memory of me when I started which is bizarre.
Odd, I’m assuming your reviews should be reflecting the progress. It’s odd where in this industry perception is everything, hope things get better D2
- not being accountable for results of the recommendations (in strategy over here)
- the lack of formal org structure (feels like I simultaneously have 5 bosses and no boss)
- the focus on one project for so many weeks/months (in industry, I led a team with multiple initiatives and service lines, and was always jumping from project to project)
I 100% feel everything you’re saying here. This is why I’ve been interviewing to go back into industry. I just can’t take it
External hire manager with 9 YOE
Question for those that overcame the slide building ‘phase’ as an experienced hire to be.
How would you advise someone to prepare for it in advance - is it once of those things that you’ll only perfect when you’re in the high expectation, low guidance, low time scenarios?
Not the biggest lever but a low effort way to help:
Get a bunch of white papers and studies from reputable consulting firms and look at the way they present data. Try to spot thinkcell objects and how they were altered by additional PowerPoint elements.
Ideally, this exercise will give you some templates to work with and establish a feel for what is good. If you combine this with some basic slide writing rules that you should be taught during onboarding (object alignment, font sizes, good action titles etc) you should be set.
Slide building
Always gotta CYA- cover your ass. This was something I had to learn the hard way.