Preparing for the Leap to Consulting

I’ve often been asked how I landed my job as a management consultant straight out of my PhD program without a postdoc or a formal business degree.  I always grin and say it was a combination of hard work, personality, and luck.  Looking back, I didn’t realize how important my ‘extracurricular’ graduate school activities would be when it was time to prepare for a career in consulting.  It took the last three years of my PhD program to build my consulting resume.

I’ve come to realize that my resume was beefed up by contributions to three major buckets of activities outside of the lab: Education, Experience, and Networking.  All three are extremely valuable and, if done well, can make you a dynamite candidate in the consulting applicant pool.

Education:
As a PhD student or postdoc you are extremely busy.  Your classes, experiments, lab meetings, journal clubs, and preparation for conferences can make it difficult to find the time to sleep, let alone take classes.  Well, nothing worthwhile is easy right?  Start by looking within your current program for options like Biomedical Statistics, as the basic principles of this course will provide a good foundation for working with and interpreting data as a consultant.  However, that will likely not be enough…

The unfortunate truth is that most science PhD programs do not include any business training, so you’ll want to seek that outside of your program.  Within the ‘Education’ bucket, the best way to pull ahead of the consulting applicant pack is to include business courses in your arsenal of academic accomplishments.  Graduate level courses in finance, accounting, and marketing will provide you with a great foundation for the business world. If time (and compliance from your PI) is an issue, talk to your PI and the business professor about an ‘audit’ option.

If taking courses isn’t a possibility for you, try to teach yourself by reading finance, accounting, and marketing textbooks.  Make friends with MBA colleagues and learn about how they ‘talk shop’ with each other.  Getting familiar with the language used in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Businessweek  will not only help you pick up some of the business jargon, but will also let you make intelligent conversation about current events during your consulting interviews.  You’ll be amazed how interesting and fun these conversations can be!

Experience:
That old adage, “experience is the best teacher” often looms large for PhD students and postdocs looking to transition to consulting.  Some experiences from your PhD (e.g., teaching/mentoring experience, leading research teams, presenting at conferences) will be valuable as you prepare for consulting interviews, but you’ll probably need more to stand out in the resume pool.  My suggestions for the ‘Experience’ bucket include activities not usually associated with your PhD or postdoc program and may require considerable time.

Consulting firms know that PhDs have been trained to enter academia, not the business world.  Therefore, firms will look for business experiences on a PhD’s resume that involve communication, critical thinking, business acumen, and an entrepreneurial spirit.  I was fortunate enough to join (and later lead) a student-run consulting club that provided business consulting to start-up pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.  This was a fantastic partnership, as the small companies were in need of (nearly) free brainpower and the students were in need of business experience.  As a graduate student, I learned how to guide a consulting team and, as the leader of this club, was responsible for forming business partnerships with clients.  Not only did each student consultant gain valuable experiences to add to their resume, the club brought together dedicated PhD students and postdocs that were eager to work together as ‘case study buddies’ and share experiences as they progressed through the recruitment process.  If your school doesn’t have a consulting club, why not start one?  A consulting firm will value your fearlessness as you embark on starting this new group.

Other interesting options for PhDs to explore are internship or volunteer opportunities at your school’s Office of Technology Transfer or with a professor planning to commercialize a discovery from their lab.  As a student, I was involved with an academia/industry partnership that yielded exciting pre-clinical work with a new biologic that became a large part of my dissertation.  Not only did I generate some really interesting data that I watched move into the clinical setting, I learned a tremendous amount about the scientific discovery process within the biotechnology industry that I still use today.

Networking:
Unlike students in business school, PhD students and postdocs, are not taught the importance of networking, as we assume that our publications and scientific work will speak for itself.  In the business world; who you know can be key to your success.  As a PhD student or postdoc, it will be important for you to develop friends, advocates, and mentors in consulting and use social networking to keep in touch with them.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to make friends and advocates in the consulting industry.  Internal advocates at the firms that most interest you can be invaluable resources into the firm’s culture, expectation, and recruiting process.  These current consultants can often act as internal referrals that assure your application materials end up in the right people’s hands.

‘Organic’ consulting friends (who you know from other venues and happen to work in consulting) are always the best place to start, but it’s never too late to make friends in consulting.  You may find that alumni from your school are happy to talk about their experiences.  Try to obtain contact information for these alumni through your school’s Career Services Department.  Do your best to attend the on-campus informational presentations offered by consulting firms and introduce yourself to the consultants and recruiters representing their firm.  Be charismatic, friendly, and collect business cards or contact information from the consultants.  Be very respectful of their time and follow-up via e-mail thanking them and ask for an additional opportunity to speak with them.  Try to form a professional relationship with them that will build support for you from within the firm.

A crisp, well-written LinkedIn profile is a nice way to stay connected with all of your professional consulting contacts.  Keep it short and make sure its content matches that of your resume.  In addition, I also started an Excel spreadsheet to track the names of consultants and recruiters and the communications I made with consulting firms.  This spreadsheet allowed me to keep tabs on my communications and assure that I wasn’t bombarding my contacts with e-mails, while not forgetting to politely reply to messages and make important deadlines.

Although there’s obviously no perfect ‘formula’ to building a consulting resume, in my experience, bolstering your Education, Experience, and Networking will improve your chance of succeeding in the consulting candidate pool. Best of luck in preparing for an exciting and rewarding career in consulting!