When Experience Matters

Many top consulting firms hire most of their consultants straight out of school. Such consultants often have exceptional academic training but limited employment experience. This lack of employment experience does not impact how well these consultants can do some tasks, but it does hinder their ability to understand what it is like to go through a large-scale organizational change, making it hard for them to lead change management initiatives.

By Kevin Turgeon

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21 May 2024

I have always wondered why top consulting firms hire so many people straight out of school and why so many companies are willing to pay incredible amounts of money to have such inexperienced consultants work on their most important projects.

Okay, I actually think I know why top consulting firms hire so many people straight out of school. It allows them to create and maintain a network of high-level people across various industries with a personal tie to their firms, which helps them get business in the future. A lot of people stay in consulting for only a few years. They then move on to more traditional roles in non-consulting industries, often at high levels. Consulting companies know this. So they hire a lot of people straight out of school, expecting many of them to not stay in consulting but go on to have long careers at the highest levels of the largest companies in the world – and when these people need help, they will think back to their days as a consultant and give their old firm a call (and a big check).

So, it does make sense that top consulting firms hire so many people straight out of school. However, this still leaves the question of why so many companies are willing to pay large amounts of money to have such inexperienced consultants work on their most important projects.

Top consulting firms typically hire people from the best universities in the world and often require the people they hire to have at least a master’s degree in their field of expertise. So, the people hired by top consulting firms are undoubtedly intelligent and talented. Moreover, they are typically supported, or at least have access to, other consultants with much more experience. But is this enough to justify the rates top consulting firms charge for these consultants? In some instances, maybe. In one particular instance, definitely not.

“Real world” experience is less important for certain types of consulting work than others. For example, computer modeling, simulation, analysis, and optimization of systems and processes do not require the person doing it to be highly experienced in the processes and systems being studied, so long as there is someone available to them who can appropriately explain how things are done and verify the accuracy of developed models. In fact, a high level of training in the most advanced modeling and analysis techniques – arguably best learned via advanced university study – is much more important in this scenario than experience with the exact processes and systems being looked at.

While there are some areas of consulting work in which experience is not that important, there is at least one area in which it is essential. This area is change management.

Change management aims to increase the return on investment of organizational change initiatives by increasing staff and stakeholder support for such initiatives. Change management is an intrinsically human endeavor that requires practitioners to understand the relationships and politics of organizations and how people respond to change in such environments. While academic study can provide change management practitioners with a basis for understanding such things – and I think it is valuable for change management practitioners to study academic works on the subject – there is a “feel” for how people are going to react to things that I do not believe can be fully learned via academic study. The only way to gain this feel for things is by having actually worked as an employee in several different organizations and personally experienced how organizational changes make you and your coworkers feel and behave.

Technical expertise can be achieved via academic study, and technical consultants who are right out of school are often very talented in their area of expertise and might be worth the rate top consulting firms charge for them. But change management is a different matter. Change management practitioners need to understand what staff and stakeholders feel when an organization undergoes a large-scale change initiative, and this cannot be learned via even the best academic course of study. It must be experienced, often several times, to be understood.