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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.
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I am surprised to hear. I was only in consulting for ~1.5 years myself but I felt I learned tons that help me hit the ground running at Google - being able to well develop and tell a story (which is often the strategy piece), identify actionable insights rooted in data analysis, track against benchmarks and KPIs, etc.
Yes, Excel and PowerPoint are good tricks to pick up, but they really are just tools to help you with your work. The thinking, analysis, and story telling is more important in my opinion - those traits carry through in more environments (eg. in a start up, you’re going to have to pitch the story / strategy to raise capital, you should probably have a lot of data driven analysis and insights throughout, etc.)
Thanks! Will say it’s definitely tougher - I’m one of two people in the broader S&O team that is from Deloitte; it’s ~90% MBB alumni.
OW has it. You learned a ton in consulting.
Different jobs require different skills. No reason for you to have those skills unless you have done that exact same job before. Which is why most consultants leave into internal projects groups (which value the consulting skills you learned), or else to roles that mirror very closely their area of specialty.
Thanks for the replies all. What startups are looking for is less strategy and more actionable, discrete skills. E.g., can you locate a brand awareness issue AND perform search engine optimization? Can you run marketing analytics software AND interpret the insights?
Consulting may teach you how to identify problems, but it doesn’t teach you how to to get your hands dirty and actually solve them.
I did plenty of cases. PMO, strategy, diligences, quant-heavy financial work. And while I can surely “manage a work stream” and “tell a story” - this supposed skill set is wholly inadequate for most jobs that require any degree of ownership.
TLDR: startups aren’t hiring 25 year olds to hand wave and craft storylines. They’re hiring to get stuff done!
Sure you learned a lot - structuring workstreams and projects, pptx and xls, managing clients....
Totally agree with McK - especially in a start up environment with scarce resources it’s all about efficiency- the perfect playground for consultants .
That’s the reason why start ups usually hire a ton of consultants, as they are usually faster in executing and share a similar mindset.
If he was a consultant for only a year, he probably learned only 1 of the 3 things you described (Excel and PPT).
Mostly agree with the above.
@OP out of curiosity, what skill set from consulting would you classify as concrete?
OP what kind of cases did you do? I felt this for the first year (and was ready to quit myself) - second year really helped and enabled me to consolidate and put in context what I learned in first year.
You probably need to reflect a bit more on your own since you never got that second year...
Ideally if you really are the one running that deep analysis, you should either have done it at BCG to get into such a role, or go at a level senior enough to have a team do it for you.
Having said that, surely you did some quant work at BCG and can figure out these technical topics... it’s more about having an open mind
Having worked both sides of the fence, startups often really struggle to figure out how and where to make money. Some basics financial skills and the ability to build a model will go a long way
Maybe PMO until you can really learn the ropes of a particular industry or learn to code