The One Big Advantage PhDs Have That Make Them The Best Management Consultants

Looking to sharpen your business acumen and/or transition into a management consulting career as a PhD?

In this episode of the Cheeky Scientist podcast, Isaiah interviews James Wadsworth. He will give you the industry insight you need to transition into a management consulting career.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, hear from PhDs who recently transitioned into management consulting careers 
• Next, Isaiah and James will discuss what is a management consultant 
• Finally, Isaiah and James share exclusive insights on interviewing for management conslutant roles. 

From This Week’s Show…

Why PhDs Should Choose Management Consulting Roles

They generally ask you for your point of view POV and you have to be very fast and sharp. It is normally very time sensitive. It’s very critical for you to answer the moment.

We’re really good at reading books and comprehension. It is a strength of all PhDs, or you wouldn’t have got your PhD or come this far. But behaviorally being able to competently make a recommendation on your feet or confidently talk through a problem when there’s pressure is a different story.

So go from that data to what does this mean and what does this mean in the context of our business, is an extremely, extremely attractive skill set for management consulting firms.

So what I’m saying is this one thing that’s fascinating and amazing about management consulting and the industry is they’re looking yes for expertise, but mostly do you have analytical capability and can you communicate and build relationships? And from there you can go anywhere you want to.

Thought, you know, at a very high level of management consultants come in and strive to answer the most difficult, most ambiguous. And in my opinion, the most exciting types of problems that face businesses today. So you do this with data logic and really just a lot of business acumen.

A lot of the focus has shifted to helping customers and clients mitigate risk, understand the new environment, and make predictions with confidence about what’s going to happen to their industry and what measures they need to put in place. 

There are business situation questions, and then there are more sort of estimation questions

We might find the right problem to solve, but to be able to synthesize the problem and make a recommendation and then have people listen to that recommendation in deep respect and then throw millions of dollars behind it to see your recommendation in the real world and solve and turn businesses around.

Getting Hired

I’m surprised how many PhDs walk into an interview, not realizing they’ll be asked to solve business problems on the interview

You could argue the reason that consultants are hired is because they’re, it’s an independent brain. You’re just hiring an independent brain that is far enough removed from the situation to see things and give you a good database answer.

Management consulting hiring processes are extremely unique. The single most unique thing about this is the case case style interview.

Once you hit that 45 minute, they will cut you off. It doesn’t matter if you’re done with the case or not. And you’ll use the last 15 minutes to talk about your experience. They’re trying to gauge not just your experience, but also your fit.

The only thing that matters in the case interview is the process. It is not the answer.

This is the premier program overall with science MBA for helping PhDs get caught up to speed on their business acumen.

I really want to encourage as many of you as possible to join the management consulting firm, get access. All of these figures, these diagrams that you see, you get those times a hundred in the program.

** for the full podcast, check out the audio player above.

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