McKinsey Operations vs. Strategy& CM (functionally generalist). I have offers from both at the associate and senior associate positions respectively.

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You can see the S& in my tag but honestly - McKinsey ops is not McKinsey in terms of prestige. It’s like working middle office at Goldman compared to being in IB. If that’s your only draw to McKinsey it should be a no brainer.

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Can confirm re: prestige and content.

You don’t need to specify operations in your CV, so McK wins for exit ops. However in operations you’ll be doing >50% operations work (you can break out and do other things but you’ll need to be both proactive about it and good). Are you interested enough in operations to do that, or will you be bored of the content?

Not sure how Strategy& pay growth is in your market? In UK it’s way worse than for McK operations who follow regular McK.

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Interesting - not sure how much truth there is to that in the McK US market at least in regards to base pay. Maybe different in variable pay?

You don’t have to list operations on your CV as McK says, but during an interview the experiences you can speak to will be much more narrow.

Our CM practice does a lot of really interesting growth oriented strategy work. The exits are great when people do leave (Uber, Beam Suntory, weed/vape businesses, P&G, PE, Google).

The gap in exit ops is real, but not as large as my McKinsey friend seems to believe.

In the US there is no gap in pay below Partner, and ours may end up being higher for many partners when you consider the deferred comp component.

With Strategy& you’d be the tip of the spear leading the strategy with the force of PwC behind you.

With McKinsey you’ll be an SME, adjacent to the folks leading the strategy, but still learning a ton and building depth in a critical area.

I don’t think it’s an easy call, good luck!

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Are you certain there’s not a pay gap at the manager and senior manager / AP / director level? Especially considering variable pay?

I’ve been doing operations strategy consulting for a while now and would ideally like to do something less ops / cost cutting focused. Partners at S& made it seem like there is plenty of interesting non-Ops work to go around in consumer markets (focused on marketing, sales force effectiveness, trade promotions, etc). However is giving up McKinsey smart? Prestige is great but I definitely do not want to do Ops forever. Also pay is an important factor for me but I assume they are pretty equal (offers are equal).

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McKinsey may open more doors, but if you don't want to do Ops then they won't be the right doors. Go to S&.

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Personally I would take the offer that will lead you down the path you want to go. What is your end goal and reverse engineer how you would get there and identify what position will be better.

How did you get both offers? Did a recruiter reach out?

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Surprisingly no - I applied online for both and got a call. I guess the consulting business is good right now.

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FWIW I’m leaning S& after everyone’s feedback

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Probably see more variety at S&. McK name is stronger.

Tiebreaker is where you felt most comfortable with the people.

I love it here. Good problem to have.

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