Future Career Management Consulting

This Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending Paul Okundaye's think tank on "Management Consulting". Paul Okundaye graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School, worked as a senior associate consultant at Bain & Company, and as a growth strategy manager at Microsoft. He is the person I admire most and I got a lot of important advice

Paul recommended two popular professional fields that business students can easily enter after graduation: investment banking and consulting. An investment banker's job is to act as a middleman between companies and people who want to buy or invest in them. Many people decide to follow the investment banking path. However, for those who like to make an impact, the job is relatively unrewarding and the hours are long. Consultants are people who give professional advice to companies on what strategies they should implement to increase their success. They analyze data and make recommendations on topics such as solving problems related to declining sales. This field requires someone to work on high-risk projects that are very stressful. The pay is lower than investment banking, but the hours are not as demanding.

One of the activities Paul did at this conference was to give us a chance to think like consultants. This activity was an attempt to determine the size of the Canadian family-oriented red car market. We were not allowed to use Google statistics, which made it challenging, but after some careful consideration we were able to come up with a decent estimate of the size of the market. Many numbers and aspects such as population, the popularity of red cars and the economic status of households were taken into account when we made our guesses, which gave us a taste of what the consultant's job entails.

All in all, I am grateful for Paul's help, which has made me more experienced and detailed in my future career planning!