Careers

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, analytics, etc.

All our consultants begin the Firm 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 people from all over the firm.

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, the Firm operates as a true meritocracy where consultants advance when they are ready based on their own abilities.

Training and development is a constant at the Firm 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 3 years of work experience will attend the Firm’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. Additionally, consultants who join without an MBA also attend our mini-MBA program. 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 (e.g. Pharmaceuticals, Banking, High Tech) and if those industries and locations are a focus for you, 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.