What it takes to Rise to the Top in the Consulting Industry

According to the QS Applicant Survey 2015, the average MBA student globally is 28 years old and often has less than four years of work experience, some way shy of what is usually required of leading executives in the consulting industry. To close this gap faster – and acquire the skills essential for these top positions more quickly – pursuing an MBA may be a big chunk of the answer for career success.

A top-ranked MBA program (such as one from big-name schools like Stanford, Harvard, Wharton and Booth, for instance) could hold as much value as 13 years of work experience, according to LinkedIn’s analysis, which refers to this particular benefit as a ‘net boost’. Even a lower-ranked MBA has valuable net boost for those holding the degree - five years’ worth of work experience, in the researchers’ estimation.  Furthermore, the net boost of the MBA was the same for men and women. Even so, the researchers did identify a gender gap elsewhere: According to the data, a woman with the same profile as a man was found to need an average of three and a half more years of work experience to have the same probability of becoming an executive.

The MBA also provides more of a career boost than other non-MBA advanced degrees in this regard, which includes the master’s degree (typically in business and technology-related subject areas), according to the researchers. Despite this, they also observed that, over the years, the master’s program has been rising in popularity for consultants. (You can see a comparison in financial earnings post-graduation between the MBA and master’s degrees in QS’s inaugural MBA ROI report for North America.) 

New York City in the US and, internationally, Mumbai and Singapore came out as the top MBA career destinations for chasing that dream executive position, when the LinkedIn researchers channeled their analysis on career trajectories.

Conversely, the US cities of Houston and Washington DC and international hubs, Sao Paolo and Madrid, had seemingly the most negative effects in terms of supplying a career boost. Of course, as the researchers note, “this could be in part due to the nature of the industries that are prevalent in these cities (for example, the financial services industry tends to be more hierarchical than the high-tech industry), as well as the higher concentration of company headquarters in those regions.” Indeed, regions with high forecasted growth and lower competition in strategic consulting (such as the US Midwest or emerging markets) - or firms that help service these regions – may hold more potential for those looking to rise more quickly to the top, post-MBA.

In short, one’s success and rise to become an executive in consulting is a result of a number of factors, some of which incumbents can control by way of the choices they make in their study and career plans. Among a number of factors identified by the researchers as helping increase probability of success, the MBA came out on top – and could increase probability of success by as much as 30 percentage points depending on the person’s background.