Strategy consulting

While management consulting and strategy consulting are terms which are often used interchangeably, strategy consulting traditionally refers to providing advice to senior management in large organisations on the future direction of their business.

This could involve assessing growth and expansion opportunities, proposing cost reduction options, or benchmarking a firm against its competitors. As most strategy consulting projects result in a series of recommendations, many firms also offer additional services in the implementation phase. In this way, the areas of strategy and management consulting have become blurred and overlap.

As a graduate working in strategy consulting, you will spend the majority of your time based at a client’s site. Your role is to support the team which is working on the assignment. Graduates often do a lot of the ‘leg work’ on an assignment, and while this may require a lot of hard work, you will be gaining valuable skills and learning from more experienced colleagues.

The main focus of the role is:

• research and data collection
• analysing information
• interviewing your client’s employees, management team, other stakeholders and industry experts
• running focus groups
• delivering workshops.

At this stage in your career you are not a specialist and it is key to be able to read up on a new industry sector or business very quickly.