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A.T. Kearney
According to a recent survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), choosing the right internship can make all the difference to your future career. The survey of nearly 700 companies around the world found that 62% of them took on MBA students as interns over the summer months. And of this group, almost three-quarters considered their interns before looking at external candidates for full-time roles. The typical company reported that half of its new MBA hires would come from the internship pool.
Consequently it looks as if sacrificing the beach for the office over the summer is a useful investment for any ambitious MBA student. And with demand for MBAs reaching new heights, the choice of internship is broader than at any time since the late 1990s. Major employers are competing for the best students and options are no longer limited to the very large organizations that provided opportunities in the past.
In the case of the London office of A.T. Kearney, one of the UK’s most prestigious consultancy firms, that figure stands around the 80% mark of the ten summer interns that the company offers places to.
Ross Geraghty talked to Emmanuel Hembert, Principal at A.T. Kearney about the company’s summer internship program.
What role do interns play at A.T. Kearney?
We take interns for the summer for a period of between one-and-a-half and three months and these are mainly from the same MBA programs that we choose our full-time MBAs from, particularly London Business School, INSEAD and Manchester Business School. There are several activities in the A.T. Kearney summer internship program, including an induction, and the same training that is given to all consultants, though it is shortened for the summer interns.
Interns are immediately put on projects with clients so that they have the immediate and genuine experience of the life and work of a consultant, both within a consulting and a client team. They are also given a piece of intellectual capital to develop for the firm on which they will need to work to develop the objective of the project. An example of the kind of task they could be given would be developing an analysis of the development of TV through the Internet in the UK, but subjects will be wide and varied.
We have around ten interns, in London. There are 42 offices in around 30 countries which take interns too, but each office has its own specific program.
Do you generally look at interns as potential future employees?
The main idea of an internship is for the incumbent to have the time to assess the job and to decide if A.T. Kearney is a company and consultancy a job that they really want. Of course, the company simultaneously assesses the intern - we ask ourselves if we believe they will be successful here with us. The interns are evaluated on their projects throughout and at the end of their stay at A.T. Kearney there is an evaluative committee to decide which ones will be offered a permanent job. It’s a good way for both parties to see if they would like to work with each other.
There is no limit to how many summer interns we will offer full time positions to; it really depends on the performance of the intern. If they all excel we will make all of them offers, as it is clearly less risky for us to hire someone we already know than a person we have hired through the normal recruiting process. At the London office I would say that there is an 80% acceptance rate of interns to full time positions within the company.
Where do you traditionally get your intake of summer interns from?
Interns are from MBA campuses and we recruit MBAs internationally. We have people from different schools such as London Business School, Manchester Business School, INSEAD, Cranfield and Cambridge Judge School of Business. These are the same campuses we recruit from for full time positions amongst MBAs.
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