Management Consulting

Industry Overview

Imagine spending your day giving advice to other people, telling them how to run their businesses better or how to save money on hiring new employees. With various specialties like IT, human resources and business strategy consulting on the growth fast track, if you’ve got the qualifications it’s likely that these firms will hungrily read your resume.

A significant number of college seniors flirt with the idea of becoming a management consultant after graduation. It’s a high-paying, high-profile field that offers students the opportunity to take on a lot of responsibility right out of school and quickly learn a great deal about the business world.

In essence, consultants are hired advisors to corporations. They tackle a wide variety of business problems and provide solutions for their clients. Depending on the size and chosen strategy of the firm, these problems can be as straightforward as researching a new market or as complex as totally rethinking the client’s organization. No matter what the engagement, the power that management consultants wield is hard to scoff at. They can advise a client to acquire a related company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or reduce the size of its workforce by thousands of employees.

Consulting is a big, one-size-fits-all term that includes virtually any form of advice-giving. Many people think first of management consulting, also called strategy consulting, which specializes in providing advice about strategic and core operational issues—but there are many other types of consulting, including marketing consulting, technology consulting, human resources consulting, just to name a few.

Career Overview

While many businesses are based on selling products or services, consulting firms primarily sell knowledge. Whether it’s management consulting, human resources consulting, marketing consulting, technology consulting or something else, consultants advise corporations and other organizations regarding an infinite array of issues related to business strategy. You name it—re-engineering, e-commerce, change management, systems integration, billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions, corporate—there is a consultant that is available to tell companies how to meet their challenges better, stronger, and faster. They are the directors behind the scenes of nearly every major event in the marketplace.

Although some of the highest-profile firms populate this segment, there are thousands of other organizations and individuals that call themselves consultants, make money by selling their advisory services, and offer plenty of opportunities for employment. If you like the idea of giving advice to other businesses, and you have a particular interest in computers, human resources, corporate communications, mobile communications, health care, financial services, real estate, e-commerce, or some other specialized field, there’s a good chance you can find a position with an organization working in an industry that suits your interests – and InternZoo lists positions in several of these areas.