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Hi jchen1, thanks for this detailed comment!

Note: I reference our second & third posts a lot, which will be published in a few days!

How long do you think it takes to pick up the vast majority (say >80%) of the transferable skills mentioned? I.e. is it likely that an optimal strategy may be to go into a top consulting firm for 1-2 years and then use the skills, brand and connections to do something more directly impactful?

• Gain some of the transferrable skills could take a 1-2 years, although 1 year seems on the low end to me. As you progress in your consulting career you will get different kinds of responsibiities (e.g. directly interfacing with senior clients). We talk a little more abou this on our next posts.

• This 80% rule woudn’t apply the connections you make. As you progress in your consulting career you’re going to make more connections, and often more important connections (e.g. to senior-level partners and clients). We talk about this in our third post

• We think the industry experience you gain is more valuable (we cover getting stafffed on relevant projects in our second post), but it take longer to get (in most cases >2 years to be staffed on specific topics).

• We cover some considerations about if/​when to leave consulting in our third post and “% of transferrable skills acquired” is one part of the considerations for leaving.

Roughly what proportion of consultants you interviewed/​in the EA and Consulting Network are pursuing this strategy vs those who think they can maximise the impact of their career by staying in consulting longer term?

We don’t have exact numbers. Most of the consultants we interviewed were still in consulting, but we expect our sample was biased because people in the EACN are more likely to be consultants. The decision to pursue one strategy over another is very dependent on how you want to have an impact—what cause areas you want to contribute to, and what career path you aspire to follow.

2) Do you have a sense of what proportion of EAs end up staying in consulting longer than planned /​than would be optimal from an impact perspective due to value drift? More concretely, I’m thinking of how the temptation to maintain a high salary or pursue the next promotion or the lack of time to spend considering other options might delay people’s exit longer than is optimal.

We did not explicity ask this, and I think it would be hard to gauge without doing a much more in-depth survey.

I would say that “value drift” implies that your values change, I think “lifestyle drift” might be more accurate (see this post for more) RE: salary /​ promotion. There are other reasons as well, such as status quo bias, risk aversion, or being too distracted to think about your values (see Habiba’s quote above). I wouldn’t consder these “value drift” per se. Ancedotally, 1 ex-consultant said they wished they’d left earlier, though I wouldn’t consider them having value drifted since they were incredibly engaged in EA before they joined consulting, and are now working at EA-aligned organisations.

The above reasons would be true for jobs in tech, finance etc. and aren’t unique to consulting.

3) Any successful case studies to support this: “You could potentially shift the project portfolio of your consulting firm towards more impactful opportunities (especially in a senior role like partner), and influence existing projects to be more effective”?

This is covered in our second post.

4. You wrote, “You can develop expertise in a specific area or industry early in your career, even when you don’t have a background into the topic through on-the-job learning, training opportunities, direct exposure to experts”. You also said that “Management consulting firms expect new consultants to spend time working across various industries before specializing, which could delay the start date for you to focus on your areas of interest by a few years.” Are you saying (1) it is possible to develop expertise in a specific area but only after a few years; (2) even in the first few years you can develop some level of expertise on each of your projects, but it’s more broad than deep; (3) something else?

In most cases we think 1) is true. However, it is possible for some people to start working on your specific topics in your first year, but this is relatively rare. We cover this in-depth in our staffing section in our second post.

In my experience (interviewed ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁), Case In Point is no longer useful, except perhaps to skim through for some ideas.

My understanding is that, when consulting firms started using case interviews, they could get away with using a handful of standardised formats (profitability diagnosis, M&A, etc.). Case In Point provides rigid frameworks to apply to those standardised formats. But the firms have got wise to this. They used these frameworks to test thinking but got ‘framework monkeys’ using canned frameworks, so now they often give cases that don’t fit those frameworks and/​or expect candidates to produce better /​ more specific insights.

I think the most helpful resources are those that focus on developing the skills being tested in case interviews. In my opinion, improving at the actual skills firms look for is a robust way to do well, is more fun, and is more useful for consulting and life.

I’d recommend the free course and articles from craftingcases.com, as well as casecoach.com. (BCG London gave all interviewees free CaseCoach access.)