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Career path
The career path of consultants at McKinsey is structured along a sequence of learning stages. However, everyone’s path is unique and includes numerous international mobility opportunities.
Consultant
Fully integrated within a team and in direct contact with the client, you make an essential contribution to the progress of an engagement. Your analyses allow you to quickly identify key issues. You conduct problem-solving processes to identify the various opportunities open to your client, and you synthesize conclusions into concrete recommendations. You interact constantly with the engagement manager and the team’s senior members in your contribution to problem solving. At McKinsey the consultant role has various levels of seniority, depending on your past experience and speed of progress.
Engagement manager
You are responsible for the good progress of the client engagement; you are the team’s driver; you pilot its activities, interacting with senior colleagues and communicating continuously with your client. You provide the latter with McKinsey’s expertise and you fully mobilize our internal resources for the benefit of the engagement. You accompany the client throughout the whole change process, ensuring the follow-up and guaranteeing the engagement’s measurable impact. This level can be reached after 3 years at McKinsey, depending on your past experience and speed of progress. Engagement managers must have functional or industry expertise as well as project management skills.
Associate principal
You can reach the associate principal level after 5 years with McKinsey, depending on your career within the firm and earlier experience. Your objective is to rapidly acquire the range of capabilities needed to become a principal in the office. You now supervise the activities of several engagement teams working in functional and industry areas in which you have become a specialist in the course of your career. You manage the relationship with the client, with whom you share new insights resulting from your research and reflection. You play a key role in developing capabilities, both within your own and the client’s team.
Principal and Director
You supervise the direction and the results of the engagements, and ensure the long-term relationship with the client. Through your knowledge development work you contribute to the development of McKinsey’s thinking and solutions, which enable you to constantly offer your clients new insights. The career path leading to the role of principal can be very short: it can be complete after 7 years with McKinsey, depending on your career within the firm and earlier experience. The role requires top expertise in both functional and industry areas, a demonstrated ability to define the line to be taken by engagement teams and to guarantee the lasting impact of recommendations—all this, while maintaining a top-management approach.
of training in your first two years as a consultant more