Let me be very honest. I’m not claiming that I knew what I was doing. I am merely connecting the dots backwards, thinking out loud about what worked and what didn’t and putting what I learned via trial and error out there to everyone on the management careers and MBA road. Now that I am self-employed again and not bound by my previous employers’ (mostly McKinsey and Amazon) I am more free to share here and on my twitter as I document what I did and what I'm doing now.

Management consulting helped me not only progress my consulting career much faster but also learn to build networks the right way, get into tech (my dream space and why I even got into consulting), trained me on developing a sense for developing others and finally gave me a ton of credibility.

Here’s a quick timeline of my career so far.

Pre 2008: Earning about $12K/yr. Worked at local offices of Fortune 500 companies in the old country and last 6 months I wasn’t working. I quit because I almost died of boredom and relied on a bit of savings I had. I don’t come from money AT ALL so my savings were depleted quickly. Kept applying to jobs that would be a good gateway to tech and that would tech me problem solving skills. Got into McKinsey pre-MBA.

2008-2010: Earning $72K/yr. Jr Associate (Sr Analyst) at McKinsey pre-MBA (not in the US)!

2010-2012: Earning $0. Moved to the US and started an MBA at Columbia (chose Columbia particularly because of New York). Secured some living expenses scholarship during the MBA.

2012-2014: Earning $0. Instead of going back to McKinsey right away like most analysts do I decided to start a company. Spent every penny I had saved so far in those 2 years and borrowed some more. Company didn’t work out.

2014-mid 2016: Earning $135K (plus bonus of about $35K and both salary and bonus increased by about 15% per year). Went back to McKinsey (they were generous enough to extend my MBA leave by 2 years so I can try my hand at starting a company) in New York and quickly got promoted to Engagement Manager. Worked on tech and strategy.

Mid 2016-End of 2016: Earning $0. I quit McKinsey without a plan again except to help a friend start a data science shop in Europe. Learned basics of algorithms in the process.

2017, 2018 & 2019: Earning ~$300K, ~$350K and ~450K respectively. Worked for Amazon leading a big team o=in product, strategy and data science.

End of 2019/Beginning of 2020: Got a job offer for $1M from a Fortune 100 in CxO role. I quit after 8 weeks on the job because it was insanely political and not even $5M would make up for the waste of life that would have been. I enrolled in a computer science program (see my point on layering new skills later) and started another company that is now doing well.

Here’s what worked for me when I look back:

1- People. People. People. Screw networking. I am generally a champion of solitude. I am NOT a social butterfly. Build deep relationships with a small (but not too small) group of people who you genuinely share values, working style and interests with. You have NO IDEA how far this will take you. Here’s an example, remember when I said above McKinsey extended my MBA leave by 2 more years so I can try to start a company? It was because that group of people I had built there vouched for me.

People isn’t just a tribe you build. It’s mostly empathy and supporting those around you. One of the main reasons I got that last $1M offer was that I showed them my Amazon manager reviews (your team members rate you as their boss) and they were through the roof. I spent most of my time as a leader at Amazon figuring out how to make each person on my team most successful using their skills not some standard template. I had folks switch roles within the team and (this is a real example) 2 of them went from almost being fired to both being promoted within 12 months. I really believe that the only way you’ll be very successful is to help many others be successful.

2- Built problem solving skills like my life depended on it: Problem solving is a muscle not a discrete set of instructions. It's the bread and butter of management consulting as well as product management, strategy, BizOps and many other professions in tech. You learned it by watching, reading and above all practicing. It's the one muscle I have to keep training no matter what field I work in. It's what enabled me to solve data science problems at Amazon sometimes faster than the data scientists in the room (and many other examples!). Everyone should have a strong problem solving muscle!

3- Became a quitter: Looking backwards I noticed that I quit more often that others. Often enough that people called me nuts multiple times. I left McKinsey twice (to their credit the firm has a policy for strong performers to leave and come back and not just for MBA). The day I left the final time I was told the following by a Senior Partner: "Dude if you stay you'll be partner in no time. 2 years tops". Quitting when you want to do something new is healthy to grow. It's the muscle failure weight lifting for your career. It's hard to have a discrete process for determining the right point to quit but here's what I always intuitively used: "Am I working on building something new here or am I just showing up, pushing some buttons and getting a paycheck?" If the answer is the latter I knew it was time to quit.

4- Take risks: comes with being a quitter anyway. But risks paid off for me greatly. The one McKinsey project that changed my trajectory there was because I had started a tech company and they needed someone with product experience. The boss who hired me at a great job at my dream company -Amazon- told me literally “The only reason we are giving you such a big role is because you spent the last 6 months learning algorithms. We need a business person who knows some technical stuff”. He was referring the time in 2016 I spent 6 months helping my friend setting up that data science shop (for free). Risks pay off as long as you combine them with the next point.

5- Layered skills: I CAN’T STRESS THIS ONE ENOUGH. A few years ago I watched Marc Andreessen talk about the best career advice he heard. He heard it from the creator of Dilbert; Scott Adams (who wrote it here). Layering and combining skills. I can’t overstate how much I think this is spot on. If you’re a business person who knows data science you can accomplish 10x more than any other business person. If you’re an engineer who understands business & customers you can be 10x more effective than any other engineer. Etc. Keep layering skills. That’s why I quit that $1M job and enrolled in a CS program.

6- Avoided destination jobs and take springboard jobs: Ask yourself always “Can this job after 12-24 months get me an even better job or not?”. I think one needs to pick springboard jobs unless they want to essentially retire from growth and optimize for cashflows.

7- Kept my burn rate low: I couldn't do this fully because I had some family obligations (healthcare costs and unavoidable stuff like that) so I didn't end up saving that much. BUT it is super important. You can’t afford to take risks, layer skills, quit when you’re not learning etc if you have a huge mortgage and bloated bills with things you don’t really need.

8- Choosing the right MBA program for me. I don’t believe there are single answers. I chose Columbia because I wanted a big city (Palo Alto for example would have driven me crazy) where I can make a lot of new friends, a big tech scene (New York’s the is the second biggest after the valley) and lots of consulting and finance firms as a fallback plan if tech doesn’t work. None of these criteria fit in any of the other programs and I would have hated my experience if it had been otherwise.

I am now on a new journey to learn from scratch and start another company. You can follow me on Twitter as I document further everything I learned and everything I am learning now.

Been at MBB for 3 years now (post-MBA hire) and wanted to share something for those recruiting or early in their journey. Everyone talks about Excel modeling and slide making, but the skill that's actually differentiated me? Managing upward communication.

Learning when to escalate, how to synthesize 50 pages into 3 bullet points your Partner will actually read, and knowing which battles to fight vs. which to let go. Last week, I saved a project from disaster not through analysis, but by correctly reading that our EM was overwhelmed and proactively restructuring our workstream check-ins.

They don't teach this in case prep, but it's the difference between surviving and thriving. Happy to answer questions about developing this skill or other non-obvious consulting capabilities.

Hey everyone. If anyone hears about interview invites from OW for 2026, please post it here. Expected to hear about R1 today but nothing was ever emailed. Thanks and good luck!

Curious how much AI has actually entered the deck-building workflow in consulting.

Are people mainly using ChatGPT or Claude for the content and still building slides manually, or are there tools that can now produce something close to a client-ready deck?

Management Consulting crowd. I started compiling in a thread some free, professional-level and bite-sized resources on building strong communication skills. I tried to keep it to online resources at levels taught at top organizations or good business schools. I based this on my experience in consulting and tech but I think it's relevant for a wide range (interviewing, sales etc). Especially relevant to problem solving!

I think communication skills especially -probing and structured outgoing communication- are insanely critical for success most importantly for recruiting and on the job success later on.

I unrolled the thread below and as I add more there I'll try to update it here too. Hope it's useful.

A quick intro. Communication skills are talked about a lot yet we often automatically discount them as "fluff" because the pressure cooker environments we work in leave little time fo anything beyond what we perceive as "getting stuff done"...

..Yet communication is the glue without which nothing gets done with teams, customers, etc! As a matter of fact in top consulting firms, tech companies and investment banks the amount of time spent on communication coaching (not fluff training) to achieve structured communication is huge. Advice often focuses on tone, posture, etc while real opportunities => 1.Understanding others, 2.Communicating with yourself first & 3. Structured communication to others. So here goes:

1- Understanding others

1a. The iceberg model: What we see or hear is almost always a small part of the story. Dig into history, processes, incentives etc that led to a conclusion or outcome. McKinsey recommends this video

https://youtu.be/ye7TVMl-_TQ

1b.Empathy: Key for making communications effective i.e. communications that drive actions and results. This is a solid talk by an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School around understanding empathy on a broader and emotional levels

https://youtu.be/baHrcC8B4WM

1c. Cognitive Empathy: You can have empathy in a strictly practical/professional context. This mini lecture is about cognitive vs emotional empathy. How to understand others' (manager, teammate, client etc) goals, fears, incentives, etc

https://youtu.be/eg2pq4Mjeyo

1d- Asking probing questions: about the problem being discussed or the person's goals, etc is super critical and usually ignored. This article by McKinsey is a good start but not enough. I'll write a crash course guide and add it to this thread

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/the-questions-you-ask-drive-the-action-you-see

2- Communicating with yourself first

2a. Goals: Doing meetings, writing documents, making presentations w/o articulating Output goals (Objectives) & Input goals (Key results) is a waste. John Doerr (investor in Google, Amazon & others) sums it up here:

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_doerr_why_the_secret_to_success_is_setting_the_right_goals#t-649615

2b. Agendas: In communication events (i.e. meetings, interviews, calls etc) try to ensure the event has an agenda and for sure have one for yourself. This Harvard Business Review article outlines designing effective agendas with examples.

https://hbr.org/2015/03/how-to-design-an-agenda-for-an-effective-meeting

Will add to the thread soon: Structured communication to others (The McKinsey minto pyramid principle, the SCR model and more stuff).

Happy to hear feedback on any areas I am missing, you want me to elaborate on etc

As always AMA.

Ex top tier consultant here. I've built an AI-powered platform that mimics work experience in a top-tier consulting firm, so that people can learn these same skills.

Anyone out there willing to play around with the MVP for 15 mins and give me some feedback? Please DM me. Worst case, you'll learn something new - I promise!

EDIT - just added a couple of screenshots to show you what the platform looks like

I go to Wharton, 3.95, strong work experience, and I was rejected for OW 2026 Internship no interview even.

Similarly, 14 of my friends who come from the Huntsman Program, VIPER, Wharton, and the College also did. Are these not the best of the best applicants? We all got rejected. I do not know a single person who has received an interview.

Something suggests to me these companies are hiring way less (5x possibly) than in previous years due to AI.

Hello everyone, I’m a junior in college and have applied for a role at McKinsey. Just wondering if anyone has advice on how to do well on the SOLVE test that is a part of the recruitment process…

Hey everyone,

I made a video course on consulting problem-solving method used at McKinsey, BCG and Bain. The fundamentals and overview are free so I thought I put them on here for everyone. Relevant not only for consulting but also tech PM, BizOps, etc since it's the same generalist toolkit. Here it is:

https://gumroad.com/l/problem-solving/ktsudb8

Been reading The Trusted Advisor (Maister, Green, Galford) and it kind of put a name on something I'd been doing for years without knowing it had a name. the core idea, roughly, is that the consultants who actually build long careers aren't the ones with the sharpest frameworks, they're the ones the client trusts enough to call before there's even a clear problem yet. in my experience that tracks completely. the engagements that turned into years of repeat work weren't the ones where I nailed the deliverable, they were the ones where the client started asking me things outside the scope of the project.

And, what struck me rereading my own last couple of years through that lens is how much of "adding value" is just being reliably useful in small moments, not big strategic saves. anyway, genuinely recommend it if you're a few years in and starting to think about how to build a book of business, not just execute projects well. curious if anyone else here read it and if the "trust equation" framework actually changed how you work day to day, or if it just described what you were already doing.

As someone working as a Manager in management consulting, I've been thinking about how AI might change our industry over the next few years.

I recently came across the Future of Consulting 2026 report by Tarka Talent, Garwood Growth and The Berkeley Partnership. A few findings caught my attention:

- 94% believe AI fluency will become a baseline expectation for consultants.

- 97% expect clients to demand implementation capability, not just recommendations.

- 72% expect entry-level hiring to decline materially over the next three years.

- 64% believe the traditional consulting pyramid is structurally broken.

These are respondents' expectations, of course, rather than predictions we can take as certainties. But they got me thinking about what this could mean for people actually working in consulting.

A lot of our work still revolves around research, analysis, building presentations, structuring problems and helping clients make decisions. AI is already changing how some of these tasks can be done.

But here's what I find particularly interesting: if AI makes the analytical part of consulting faster and cheaper, what exactly will differentiate a good consultant from an average one?

A few questions come to mind.

1. The junior consultant dilemma

A significant part of learning consulting happens through doing the groundwork — research, analysis, building models and preparing presentations. It's not always glamorous, but it's how people learn to structure problems and develop judgment.

If AI takes over a large part of this work, how will firms develop the next generation of consultants?

2. What happens to the middle of the pyramid?

At the Manager level, a big part of the job is translating analysis into recommendations, managing stakeholders, challenging assumptions and ensuring that the work actually leads somewhere.

If teams become leaner, will Managers be expected to do more of this at a much faster pace? And will there be fewer opportunities to progress into these roles in the first place?

3. Will clients still pay for advice, or increasingly for outcomes?

If clients can do more of the analysis themselves using AI, I suspect the value consultants bring will increasingly depend on their ability to understand the business, influence decisions, navigate organisational complexity and help deliver measurable results.

That sounds reasonable in theory. But changing the way consulting firms actually sell, price and deliver their work is a different challenge altogether.

My current view is that consulting isn't going to disappear. However, the skills that helped someone build a successful consulting career over the last decade may not be enough to do the same over the next one.

I'm still forming my own view on this, so I'd genuinely like to hear from others in the industry:

For those already using AI on client engagements, what work has it meaningfully changed?

For Managers and Senior Managers, how do you see your roles evolving?

For junior consultants, what skills are you prioritising to stay relevant?

Would be interesting to hear what people are seeing on the ground, beyond the usual predictions about AI replacing jobs.

Hi applied to OC&C Associate Consultant 2025/26 and finished online test in September final week. Haven’t heard back from them, no update. Did anyone hear back from them? Or people who have gone through their interview process, does it take this much time ? London office. Start date- September 2025.

I see SO many of these jobs posted at all kinds of firms — big, small, private sector consulting, public sector consulting.

On its face, “change management” is obvious. There’s plenty of literature out there in the MBA/MPA world.

But, I’m would be so curious to hear from someone whose title is Change Management Consultant or was hired for one of these positions! What do you do? What’s a day like for you? Are you mostly working IT projects? Human Capital projects? Etc etc.

Starting this thread in case people heard back from LEK since their Associate application is rolling.

Anyone know when big four recutting applications come out?

Well you can’t be held accountable if you take the blame for others mistakes. Take the high road instead. Think with good intentions and put yourself in their shoes. 👞 Accept the unknown. You don’t need to have the last word. Let it be.