Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
Although landing a job at a top consulting firm can be the ultimate dream for many business students, not everyone who applies will make the cut — and some young professionals may be less interested in the industry than the MBAs that came before them.
But for new grads who still want the breadth of experience that generally comes with working in consulting, there are other options.
Gorick Ng, a Harvard University career advisor and the author of "The Unspoken Rules," told Business Insider that many students are laser-focused on landing a consulting job, but "there are also many more students who just want to get a solid foothold in the early steps in their career. And consulting firms provide a great toehold for doing so, but they're not the only ones that offer a great toehold," he said.
Consulting has long been alluring to young professionals who are drawn in by the prestige that comes with working at one of the major firms. Ng said those firms tend to do a great job at creating a sense of FOMO — or fear of missing out — on campus, with many students feeling pressured to pursue those jobs largely because the people around them frame them as the ultimate catch.
But Ng said he's seen an uptick in students who land an internship with a consulting firm and afterward choose not to return for a full-time role. Part of that he attributes to the way Gen Z grads in particular are increasingly seeking meaning in their careers.
Instead of getting sucked into the allure of consulting by default, he encourages students to look for other ways to get some of the benefits that come with starting a career in consulting.
That's where dedicated early-career programs come in.
Young consultants previously told BI that one of the biggest perks to their jobs was that they were able to learn a lot — and very quickly. Working on different projects every few months allowed them to gain a lot of work experience and get a better idea of what kinds of roles they will ultimately want to pursue, they said.
Ng said those are the exact kinds of perks that new grads can get at companies with early-career programs. Some of the best programs to look for are those that offer one- or two-year rotational programs that allow the new hire to rotate between different aspects of the business, such as sales, marketing, HR, or operations.
"Consulting is an opportunity to see a wide variety of people, of types of business problems, of different contexts," Ng said. "More and more corporates are coming to realize that actually they can offer quite a competitive experience through these leadership development and rotational programs."
Ng said that one of the most impressive students he has mentored was gunning for a role at a consulting firm but that the competition was fierce. He looked for other options and ended up accepting a role at a media company in its leadership development program for early professionals.
Ng has compiled a list of more than 1,000 companies that have early-career programs. He recommended young professionals filter the list by industries they are interested in. For those who are unsure what industries those would be, he said to simply consider which words sound the most intriguing or which brands are ones they actually engage with in their daily lives.
Some of Ng's favorite companies to direct young professionals to are GE, Fifth Third Bank, Aon, CNBC/NBC Universal, Grainger, and Salesforce. He's worked with people at each of these companies whose job it is to ensure early-career talent can learn a lot and have access to resources needed to advance, he said.
As for the tech companies with dedicated early-career programs, his list includes companies such as Nvidia, PayPal, Snap, Dropbox, Zoom, and Workday. And if you're interested in finance, some of the top companies with programs for new grads are UBS, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Piper Sandler, per his list.
Ng said that although consulting can be a great career and an entry-level job, it should not necessarily be the default goal of every ambitious student, adding he thinks "most people want to become consultants because they were told by their friends that it's 'prestigious.'"
"But there's such a bigger world out there," he said. "And you may find — as many people do too late — that there's actually a more direct path to doing what you want to do."
