In June 2016, I was contacted by a McKinsey recruiter on LinkedIn. My profile was interesting, because of my background in agricultural science and my PhD in digital soil mapping.
A shared passion for agriculture
I was very surprised a consulting firm was interested in someone with such a technical profile. During my interviews, I learned my expertise could be quite helpful in solving real industry issues. I was impressed and fascinated by the energy and passion of the people I met along the way, especially those leading McKinsey’s work in agriculture.
I joined McKinsey in November 2016 as a knowledge consultant and researcher in the Brussels Innovation Center. Previously, I worked for four years in research and two years as a scientific advisor in the public sector. As a researcher, I spent years crunching data and debugging my code. Although satisfying when solved, problems in research didn’t feel real to me.
Blending problem solving and data
In my role with McKinsey, I help clients understand how powerful data is when it’s applied with strong problem-solving and industry expertise. One of my favorite projects so far has been developing a partially-automated system to determine land suitability for growing certain crops at certain times. To achieve this, I had to:
- Acquire knowledge on the growing conditions required by the crops. I did this by reaching out to a network of McKinsey experts who were a wealth of information and always very eager to chat
- Gather data layers of the different parameters I wanted to include in my model
- Create the model itself. Some serious data crunching here and I confess it was a lot of fun!
What stimulated me the most was a conversation I had with one of my colleagues after I presented my model. He told me that without economic insights attached to it, my suitability model would mean very little to our clients. That’s when I realised what matters to the industry: tools that allow strategic decision-making. Now, I’m working on adding economic aspects of crop growth into the model.
I love how constantly I’m challenged at McKinsey. I always have opportunities to learn new things from my colleagues and clients.
About Delphine
Based in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Delphine is a knowledge consultant and research scientist with our Agriculture practice and ACRE by McKinsey, one of our firm's 50+ New Ventures startups. Prior to McKinsey, she was a policy advisor with Belgium's Environment ministry, and a scientific officer with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. She holds a doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain, a master's in land management from Cranfield University, and a dual master's and bachelor's in bioengineering from Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech - Université de Liège.