Careers

New consultants join McKinsey in either an office generalist role or a functional practice role. Practice roles are best for consultants who are seeking a steady, though not necessarily exclusive, amount of work in a particular topic area, such as marketing, operations, technology, etc. Office generalist roles are best for consultants who have not yet decided how they would like to focus their programs. These roles give them an opportunity to work on a very broad set of functional topics. As consultants progress in McKinsey, they are encouraged to build out areas of core expertise, which often involves joining or affiliating with a practice. By nature of their experience and interest, many experienced professional hires join practices directly if they have a core expertise and/or interest in a particular topic. However, many also join offices as generalist consultants.

No. The interview format is largely the same for campus and experienced professional candidates.

First, to be selected to interview with us, you must have a background that indicates strong leadership, problem-solving, and analytical abilities gained from your work, education and other experiences. If you are interviewing with one of our practices, the depth and breadth of the knowledge you gained while at work will be a focus area. If you are interviewing with an office as a generalist consultant, your specific knowledge and experience may not be as much of a focus as other elements of your background, such as leadership, achievement, problem-solving, or drive.

McKinsey holds the same bar on leadership, personal impact, achieving, and problem-solving for all consultants. In addition, practice candidates will be assessed on their knowledge depth, knowledge interest, and practice-relevant experience.

The number of experienced professional hires at McKinsey is growing and we now have a rich community and network of professionals joining from many different industries and backgrounds. McKinsey’s clients value the diversity of knowledge and insight that our experienced consultants bring to engagements and it is quite common for our more experienced professionals to play a key-client-leadership role on teams.

Solid consulting skills are very important for a successful career at McKinsey. The focus for most of your first year is on building and rounding out the core consulting skills that will be important to your longer term success as a consultant, such as skills in structured problem solving, client communications, influencing, or analytics.

All McKinsey consultants begin in a formal training program that helps to introduce these core consulting skills before working on client-engagement work. Once you begin client work, the staffing process is focused primarily on what will be optimal for your development. While we usually try to place you on projects that leverage some aspect of your background, we will intentionally give you opportunities to solve problems you haven’t encountered before. We have found this to be very valuable in building the general problem-solving skills that will make you successful at the firm over the long term.

Your first year is always a time of tremendous growth and learning, which can sometimes be a difficult adjustment. We have both formal and informal processes to help support you, such as a training program designed exclusively for experienced professional hires where you can meet McKinsey people from all around the world.

In summary, McKinsey can enable you to build skills in new industries and functional areas as well as utilize and build on the skills and experience you have already gained. After building on your core consulting skills, you can choose to craft a program that leverages your background, experience and knowledge by serving clients on topics close to your background area, or you can choose to focus your program on completely new client topics. In either case, you should be prepared to grow your knowledge base of new industries and functional topics.

For all our consultants the role you play is purely contingent on your own abilities and aspirations, rather than your title or background. McKinsey is a non-hierarchical organization and is organizationally flat. In this respect, McKinsey operates as a true meritocracy where consultants advanced when they are ready based on their own abilities.

Training and development is a constant at McKinsey across all tenure levels, from business analyst to director. All consultants attend regular programs tailored to accommodate their specific needs and background. For example, consultants hired with more than three years of work experience will attend McKinsey’s experienced hire workshop within your first nine months. This dynamic workshop is designed to give you the opportunity to identify and develop techniques for integrating successfully in McKinsey as an experienced hire. Our learning programs are broad-ranging from specific knowledge building to public speaking and problem solving–to personal communication and influencing skill building.

Your travel and lifestyle may vary widely depending on the client engagement you are working on at any given time. However, an average McKinsey consultant is traveling 40 percent of the time. Sometimes travel is in heavy concentrations between Monday and Thursday, and at other times is fairly infrequent. Some industries are very geographic in nature (for example, pharmaceuticals, banking, high tech), and if those industries and locations are part of your focus, you could travel less than the average consultant. Striking the right work/life balance is very important to sustaining a long-term consulting career, so our weekends are very guarded and it is rare to work on the weekend unless you are traveling internationally.

A personal experience interview is a style of interview that focuses on a particular skill, such as leadership, drive, or personal impact. The goal of a personal-experience interview is to give the interviewer a solid understanding of your abilities and experience in each of these areas. Prior to your interviews with us you should think about examples of where you have had personal impact and where you have demonstrated entrepreneurial drive, problem-solving abilities, career achievements, and leadership. We strongly urge you to review the material on our Web site to help you prepare for your experience interviews.

On a given interview day, you should have several compelling examples you can discuss. The purpose of the experience exercise is for your interviewers to get a sense of who you are and what characterizes your unique interpersonal style. The more examples we have, the more insight we gain into your skills. If relevant, it is helpful to repeat your strongest experience examples between different rounds of interviews.

We look at both the case and personal experience performance to make a decision about next steps in the interview process. You should spend some meaningful time preparing for both parts of the interview.