Role Descriptions

This is a position for final-year students in bachelor’s or master’s degree courses during the current year and for people who graduated during the previous year and have had less than 12 months of full-time work experience since graduation.

The business analyst internship, which runs about 9 to 12 months, is designed for people who want to gain firsthand experience of management consulting and to learn about careers at McKinsey. As a business analyst intern, you’ll experience a McKinsey consultant’s day-to-day life as an active member of a team, responsible for specific parts of projects, and get day-to-day coaching and your own personal mentor. Like the rest of the team, you’ll work with clients at their sites and spend time with your colleagues in the McKinsey office to understand how it operates. Upon completing the program, interns are invited to a final interview. If they pass it, they become McKinsey business analysts.

This is a position for candidates with a bachelor’s or master’s degree and more than one year of work experience.

In client engagements, business analysts take responsibility for solving discrete parts of problems. They play an important role on client-engagement teams, actively contributing to the final recommendations and often presenting their work to the client’s senior executives. They also have a voice in determining the team’s style and work pace.

After two or three years, business analysts find different ways to continue their personal and professional development. Many take leaves of absence to pursue advanced degrees or to spend time in new industries or nonprofits and then return to McKinsey as associates. Successful business analysts even get McKinsey funding to pursue their MBA studies. Other top performers are promoted directly to associate.

This is a position for candidates who hold a master’s, an MBA, a PhD, or another advanced degree and have more than three years of work experience.

Associates lead key parts (usually called “workstreams”) of client engagements. They apply a broad range of creative problem-solving skills, combining technical and analytical excellence to help solve their piece of the client’s overall puzzle. Associates develop conclusions into recommendations and work directly with the client’s senior leaders to implement change.

As associates serve clients in different industries and functional areas, they develop a broad tool kit of problem-solving skills, leadership capabilities, and foundational knowledge that they can apply to each new client engagement. Because the skill sets of associates entering McKinsey vary, so will their mix of client exposure and formal training. When associates are ready for the next level of responsibility, they become engagement managers.

The final decision about your role—junior associate or associate—will reflect your performance in the interview.

We occasionally hire experienced professionals with exceptional track records in the private or public sector for senior consulting roles as engagement managers and associate partners. Generally, though, we advance our consultants into these positions from roles as business analysts and associates, after evaluating their contributions and performance.