Hi everyone. My name is Elaine Lu. Thank you for joining me on Exploring Consulting Careers. My role at Cornell Career Services is a career readiness coach. So I work with a lot of students with their internship or job search process. I do focus, have a area of focus when it comes to working with students interested in consulting careers. So if you have any questions related to consulting careers, the application or interview process, you can always schedule appointment with me at Cornell Career Services. My office is located at Barnes Hall, so I work at the Central Office. Most colleges have their own career centers such as CALS, Arts and Sciences, Dyson, Nolan, and so on. So you're more than welcome to meet with your college career center or with me at the central office. The first thing that I want to introduce is the career development toolkit. The career development toolkit is available to you as a Cornell student or a Cornell alumni. Essentially, this is your one stop shop for anything related to career development or career exploration. We have a lot of modules to support you with this journey, such as the exploration phase, resume, cover letter, understanding the job process. Within each of these module, there's step by step guides on that specific topic. We also have modules on further education, which is pre grad, pre law, pre vet, and pre health, and we also have modules that focus on industry specific. There's the consulting module, data science, entrepreneurship, finance, product management, and so on. For this particular workshop, a lot of the content is found on the consulting module. If you do not see the career development toolkit on your Canvas page, you can self enroll by scanning this QR code or using the link, which is career.cornell.edu/toolkit to self enroll. The career development toolkit is a course on your Canvas, but nothing on the career development toolkit is graded. This is more of a resource for you rather than a graded course. This is available to you 24/7. If you have a career question after work hours or on the weekend or on the holiday, you can always utilize the career development toolkit to have your answers clarified. This is the career development cycle, within the career development cycle. This is our theoretical approach when it comes to advising and working with students. There are three stages within this cycle, Understanding yourself, what are your interests, values, strengths, and goals. The explore option phase is utilizing different resources, networking, participating in different activities, doing volunteer, part time, full time jobs, or internship, taking action is creating those application materials from cover letters, resumes, interviews. Throughout these three stages, Cornell Career Services is here to support you through this journey. Today's workshop is more so in the explore option phase where you're learning more about the consulting career paths. Today's learning outcome is going to be a consulting overview. What is the consulting field like? What are some skills that recruiters and employers look for? Networking tips when it comes to one on one conversations or group settings. The different interview types that you will be doing if you want to be in a consulting internship or a full time job. What does the recruitment timeline look like for you, the different roles and firms, and additional resources to support your consulting career journey To start off, what is consulting? Consulting is a business of providing expert advice to a specific group of people. Typically, you are hired by a consulting firm and your client is another organization or a firm that needs support when it comes to supporting their business function. These consultants act as professionals who provide expertise to organizations to help them maximize their profitability or effectiveness and keep them running smoothly. Consultants acts as providers by providing knowledge, by solving business problems or suggesting any solutions or recommendations to support their clients. When it comes to preparing for consulting fields, recruiters generally don't look at specific majors. However, they do look for candidates with specific skill sets, and those skill sets are analytical, problem solve, communication, teamwork, customer service, ability to drive impact. Additional skills include presentation, Excel, languages, leadership, and client readiness. It was important for us to define the consulting field or what consulting does because as you can see, there's a lot of these skills that are demonstrated when it comes to working with a client, understanding their business problem, or communicating to learn their business problem, knowing how to problem solve and help them meet their barriers or understand their barriers and provide some solution. So a lot of these skill sets are what recruiters look for when selecting or reviewing different candidates. NACE is the National Association of College and Employers, and they identify eight career competencies that employers look for in their application materials or interview process. Those eight competencies are career and self development, communication, critical thinking, equity inclusion, leadership, professionalism. Teamwork and technology. Some of these competencies we discussed in the previous slide. Within all these career competencies that NACE identified and the skill set that we identified in the previous slide. A lot of these skills you have already gained from your course experience, your academic project, volunteers, being part of different clubs or organizations on campus. By being exposed or having experience on these competencies or skill set, it's important to identify highlight and showcase fit within your application materials or during an interview process. If you feel like you are having difficulties thinking about these competencies or skill set, you can always speak with a career advisor to discuss your previous experience and see how we can discuss those transferable skills. What is networking? Networking is when you're cultivating or creating professional relationships by seeking out and connecting with individuals who support your career endeavors There's two forms of networking. The first form is informal interviews. This is when you're having one on one conversations and you're learning from alumnis, employers, friends, families, your neighbors, upper classmens, or even your classmate. By having these conversations, you're able to prepare for the position or industry. You get a better understanding of the specific organization. You can get insider tips or knowledge for the application or recruitment process, and building these relationship will help you develop your professional network. You can also have the opportunity to share your interests and goals to someone who works in that field. To learn more about networking, I highly recommend checking the networking module on the career development toolkit. The second form of networking is through more of a group setting, so participating in career fairs, info sessions, or workshops with employers. This is a really good way to connect with potential employers or recruiters. You can learn about the job and the company to see what fits for you based on your interests and skill sets, and you can also get insights of the recruitment process for that particular employer. And their application requirements. To learn more about these info sessions, career fairs, and knowing what to expect and how to prepare, I highly recommend checking the fairs module on the career development toolkit We do have an upcoming fair or networking event happening for this coming September 2024. The consulting internship exploration fair is posted on handshake. On this particular slide, I indicated some quick tips to prepare. You want to dress for success, you want to make a good impression when you're meeting these employers. You want to prepare a professional introduction. A brief description of who you are, what are you interested in and why you're interested in speaking with them. If you're interested in developing or crafting your professional introduction, I highly recommend checking the networking module on the career development toolkit You want to print and prepare any materials such as your resume. You want to make sure your resume has been reviewed, printed before giving to the employer to let them know your previous experiences. You want to make sure you look at which employees are attending to this event. You want to do your research on them to see what services or opportunities that they offer and see how they connect and align with you. When attending to any fairs or networking events, you always want to enter curious, respectful, and professional. On the right side of the slide, I took a screenshot of the content on the fairs module on the career development toolkit. Within this module, you can learn about how to prepare for the fair, how to navigate the in person and virtual fair. What are some tips for successful interaction when you're making those conversations with employers or representatives Lastly, how you can follow up with those employers just so you can show some appreciation of having that conversation with them So I highly highly recommend visiting the fairs and networking module on the career development toolkit. This slide talks about handshake and how to identify different opportunities and events. As you can see on the screen the screenshot on the right side, I have a yellow arrow highlighting update your profile. The first thing that I always recommend students to do is update your handshake profile because you never know who is going to look at your handshake profile to see your experiences and accomplishment. This is a really good way for employers to see your previous academic background or your experiences, completed projects or coursework. When you register for an event on handshake, employers actually see the list of their attendees and they can click on their profile. So this is a really good opportunity for them to see who you are and for you to let them know who you are and your experiences. On the left side of this slide, I circled the jobs and events. Let's look at the jobs first. In this particular internship that I screenshot at the time, there is a 2025 internship that was posted a week ago, and you have to apply by September 13. When looking for any opportunities, you want to know when The job was posted. Keep in mind that sometimes there are jobs that were posted a few months ago. Let's just say about five months ago. It's very unclear if the employer forgot to remove that job posting because it was posted five months ago. Sometimes people actually forget to remove the job posting and just leave it up there. You want to be mindful of when that job was posted. You're applying for jobs that are currently available. Next, there's that events arrow. Within the events page or tab on the handshake website, you can see a lot of networking events where you can connect with employers through workshops, info sessions, or even the fair. For this particular sample, I screenshot at the Consulting internship Exploration fair. You can see which employers are attending the fair or facilitating the workshop. As you can see in the consulting internship Exploration fair, you see three little bubble icons of different firms. We see PWC, EY and Deloitte From there, we can indicate that those are the employers who plan to attend this coming consulting internship exploration fair. Because we know they are going to be attending to this on campus fair, it's very important for you to do research on the firm to see what services they offer, how they align with you. You want to develop any questions that you want to ask prior to the fair. To really prepare for this upcoming fair or any upcoming consulting workshops or info session events. I highly recommend checking out the networking module and the fairs module on the career development toolkit If you have any questions about your networking approach or a networking strategy or how to engage with employers, you can always schedule an appointment with an advisor to discuss what to expect and your strategy plan. When it comes to applying for consulting positions, interviews, internships or full time job, there are two types of interviews. The first one is behavioral and fit. This is your opportunity to showcase your skills, your personalities, and experiences, and you really want to showcase fit with what that employer is looking for. This is the employer's opportunity to define their job responsibilities and general expectations for you. It's a two way street. They're getting to know you and you're getting to know them. The interviewer is evaluating your abilities, your accomplishments, your personal qualities, your enthusiasm, and your short and long term goals. The case interview is when an employer will pose a business problem relevant to it's organization and ask the candidate to propose logical steps to resolve it. Within the case interview, they're mimicking a real life case scenario of what a consultant does, but in a more condensed version. The interviewer is evaluating your creativity, your poise, your analytic abilities, and most importantly, your problem solving skills. Other aspects that they're going to be evaluating is your structuring, numeracy, judgment and insight, creativity, synthesis, and case leadership. I do want to note that recruiters suggest preparing for behavior and fit interviews at least one to six months before the interview. For case interviews, it's recommended to start preparing two to six months in advance. So if you're new to consulting or this is the first time you're hearing about case interviews, don't worry. We're going to be talking more about what a case interview is in the next following slides. As mentioned, a case interview, the purpose of it is to stimulate an actual case, a consulting case, and to determine if the candidate has the skills for the position they're applying for. The interviewer is evaluating analytical, problem solving, creative, and communication skills. The anatomy of the case or the format of the case will go back by a series of steps. The first one is the background. The background is when the interviewer will be reading a description of the case and the background to the interviewee After the background has been read, the interviewee will recap and re summarize the background to the interviewer. Next, the interviewee has the opportunity to ask two to three clarifying questions just to make sure they understand the business problem of the case. After you get your clarifications on those questions, you can take a grand pause, which is a two minute pause for you to really gather your thoughts on what areas to investigate or what areas to propose to investigate for your interviewer The game plan is the part where you're introducing and presenting your structure of areas to investigate to your interviewer. After you finish the structure, you will receive a creative question or a quantitative question or both. The creative question is going to challenge your creativity, your ability to understand or think broadly of the case. The quantitative part will challenge your case math and there are chances where you're going to be analyzing graphs or charts or data. The last part of the case is when you're going to provide a case summary. This is where you're going to provide any recommendations, next steps, any risks to consider within this case after your analysis. There are different types of case interviews. I only indicated four here. The first one is market sizing. This is when you're helping your client understand their customer profile, how big it is the profile and who they are. Profitability is increasing the profits of a business. Market study and market entry is entering a new market to grow. Essentially, let's just say when a business is starting a new innovation or a new product, they want to enter the market. Merger and acquisition is typically a larger firm or firm wants to acquire another company. I just list out four different types of interview cases and they are different types of style as well. There are two different ways that interview is going to be processed. The first one is interviewer led, and this is when the interviewer is leading the conversation or leading the case. Interviewee led is when the interviewee  is leading the conversation or the case. So for this slide, we're going to go over a brief case together. So this case was found on management consulted. As a Cornell student, you have access to management consulted to prepare for any upcoming case interviews and case prep. So this case is mobile watch. So the background is your client has just developed a new product, the mobile watch. They asked you to develop a market entry strategy as it is a completely new product. Now, after you receive the background, you want to summarize and recap the background to the interviewer. Once that background has been summarized, you want to ask any clarifying questions. Some questions to consider to ask for your interviewer is, is there a timeline of when to enter the market? Where does the client plan to launch this product? Who are the competitors? These three questions will give a better understanding of this business case for you to understand the problem your client is facing? The structure part is where you're going to take a grand pause for 2 minutes and you're going to gather your thoughts. Once you finish gathering your thoughts, you want to restate the purpose of the case and present areas to investigate. Within this case, our client wants to enter a market with their new product, which is a mobile watch. Some areas to investigate are the external factors. Who are the competitors? Who are the customers? Another area is the internal factors, what's the company capabilities? What's the operation or financials of this current company? Once the structure is completed, you will be presented either a case math or creative question. In this case, there's a case math. The case math question is, your client is ready to enter the market. Their product is similar to the Apple Watch, but released prior. What is the size of the market? To answer the case math question, you always want to think out loud. What I mean by thinking out loud is as you're doing your math calculation or your thinking process, you want to speak out loud so your interviewer is able to follow. So within this answer, let's consider or estimate that our client is focusing on the US population. The US population size is about 320 million. Assume that 80% of the age population has access to smart watches. 80% of 320 is 256 million. So 256 million is the people who have access to this luxury Smart watch item. However, we also want to estimate income status, because not everyone is willing to purchase this luxury item. Let's estimate that 40% is low income. 40% of 256 is 102.4 million, and 40% is medium income, and that is 102.4 million again. 20% of the population is high income, which is 51.2 million. We get 51.2 million by doing 20% of 256 million. After doing the calculation of the different income income statuses in the population income status who has access to smart watch, we need to consider willingness to pay. Because this mobile watch is a luxury item, let's make assumption that this is not a necessity is more of a luxury. 0% of low income is not willing to purchase this item. 10% of medium income is willing to purchase this item 10% of 102.4 million is 10.24 million. And 40% of the high income is willing to pay for this product. 40% of 51.2 million is 20.28 million. Now after we calculate the willingness to pay, we want to add it all up. So zero million is low income, 10.24 million is medium income, and 20.28 million is high income. Once you add that all together, it's 30.32 million US population or 9.5% of the US population is willing to pay this mobile watch based on income status and access to smart watch. After you calculate the case math answer, you want to provide final recommendations. What are some risks or next steps that your client needs to consider? Things to consider about this new mobile watch. They are pursuing a completely new product into the market. They want to assess the client competencies and evaluate any acquisition targets. If you have any questions about case prep or case interview, you can always schedule an appointment with a career advisor and we're happy to walk you through the process. We do have resources that support casing, so you can always check that out as well, and we'll discuss that later on in this presentation. Now I want to talk about the recruiting timeline. I want to emphasize and note that most consulting firms hire a year in advance, and this is a general timeline and some applications, interviews, offers will go off cycle. Before we look into this chart, I want to talk about a few things. Early summer is when full time and internship positions starting the following summer will be posted and open for application. Mid summer is when some companies begin first round interviews. Late summer late September is when final interview rounds and offers extend to students. Once again, I want to highlight this is a general timeline. Some companies will go off cycle. Knowing that early summer is when positions are being posted. Let's just make an estimation that around June is when some companies start posting their jobs. If we know June is when the start of the consulting firms start submitting their applications or having their applications open. You want to have your resume, your cover letter prepare in advance. And while you get your resume and cover letter prepare in advance, you want to start preparing for the interview process. As I mentioned earlier, it takes a few weeks and months to really practice for the behavioral and case interview. You want to prepare for those interview and application, material prep, months in advance or weeks in advance. As you're preparing for those interviews and applications, you want to conduct your research and you want to network with employers or alumnis, or upper classmens, people who are in that field or in that industry or company you're interested in. As I mentioned earlier during the networking slides, when you network and conduct this type of research, you get insider information of how to make your application stand out and you get to understand which type of firms you might be interested in applying for. Management consulted has a application deadline tracker, which I really like sharing with students and visiting occasionally just to know when firms are submitting or opening their applications to any students who are interested in consulting. I would highly recommend checking that out. Now I want to talk about the different types. There are different types of consulting firms and there's different types of consultants. The first one is different types of consulting firms. We have the tier ones, which is known as the MBB, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain Then there are tier two. The Tier two also includes the Big four. The big four is KPMG, PWC, EY, and Deloitte Tier three are the boutique firms and they specialize in more industry specific roles. There's other small firms and mid sized firms and independent. Independent is when you're doing contract work as a consultant. The two different consulting roles are specialists. Specialists focus on specific type of industry or capability. There's tech consultants, health care, human capital, et cetera. There is generalist who offers services and work with all clients across different industries or areas of business. I do want to emphasize and note that you want to network, research, and reflect on your values and goals when considering which type of consultant you want to be or which type of firm. Every firm and every type of consultant is different. You want to consider your work life balance, what you want that to look like, the type of work or service you'll be providing, what is the pay, work culture, and other factors To start off Tier one, also known as MBB. McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain, they're known as Tier one. They are the most prestigious global firms that recognize for highly selective recruitment, high profile clients, and significant major impact on corporations and governments. They do generate high revenue and offer the highest salaries to their interns and consultants. As a MBB consultant, you will be a generalist and you work with all industries, and you do expect a lot of traveling. If you're interested in MBB, I highly recommend attending to any info sessions or workshops, conduct any informational interviews with alumnis or people in those companies just to learn more about their experience. Big four or Tier two. Big four includes KPMG, PWC, EY, and Deloitte They started out as consulting firms and extended their services to consulting. They have core areas of implementation and transformation, technology, and transaction services and deals and strategy. Tier two firms also have a reputable and international presence. I only highlighted two other tier two firms because of the spacing that had on my slide, but there are other Tier two firms that you can check out for sure. Tier two firms have a strong expertise in specific industries and function and their teams are more specialized. Similarly, from the previous slide, if you're interested in any big four or tier two, highly recommend going to info sessions, workshops and connecting with anybody who works in that field or with that employer. Boutique firm. Boutique firms are smaller firms with different work culture and work life balance compared to Tier one and Tier two. Boutique firms have specialists, consulting career paths that focus on specific industries, regional players, and it's more niche area of focus. There's health care, life science, public sector, energy, and so much more. There are so many boutique firms and I only highlighted a few of them just on how much space I had on the slide. I highly recommend doing research on boutique firms if you're interested in being a specialist or if there's a specific field that you want to focus more on. There's so many that you can do research and on this slide, I indicated some resources that can help you with that search as well. Lastly, there's internal strategy teams that I'm going to talk about today. They are not consulting firms but internal strategists within a company. So as an internal strategist, you're not hired by a consulting firm. You're hired by that company and you work as a consultant for that company. You will specialize in a specific industry and because you work for this company, you have the ability to see the results and you have longer term ownership on the impact. There's much less traveling than external consultants because you're working for that specific company, and because you're working with that company, you have a deeper understanding of the operation, product, strategy, and policies. The training for internal strategy teams are very different from consultant firms. From this slide, I only indicated a few companies with internal strategy teams, there's a lot of other ones that you can look for as well. Now let's start off by going over different resources available to you to prepare for casing or consulting fields. Case Coach is a resource available to Cornell students. This tool provides comprehensive supports to students with consulting internships or full time job applications. With Case Coach, there are many courses. I screenshot at some of the courses available to you. They have case interview prep for anyone who's just getting started with casing. There's a case math course if you're not too familiar with case math or math in general. They have courses about fit interview, personal experience interview, consulting recruitment essential details, resume for MBA candidates and student applicants. Addition to the courses, there are practice opportunities. They have virtual practice room where you can meet with other interview candidates, so you can practice casing together. In order to really improve on your casing, you really need to practice with a partner. There are also a case library where you can have access to hundreds of different cases from different sectors or area for you to practice, whether you're doing it by yourself or with a partner, or with a friend. There's also opportunities to do drills as well. Let's just say you need more support when it comes to case math or reading some different data or diagrams. They have drills for you on that to improve that area of the case. Management consulted is another excellent resource to support students with their casing journey. Similarly to case coach, they provide step by step guidance of the whole interview and application process. For today's case sample that we went over earlier, the case was from management consulted. Management consulted does provide a lot of additional resources that case coach does not have. For example, the articles that they post of different trends of different consulting firms. They have application deadline tracker of different consulting firms of when they're releasing the jobs and when that application is due. They have formula sheets and drills for you to practice that casing process or that structuring process. They also have a firm directory for you to learn about the different types of firms or boutique firms. As I mentioned earlier, there's many different types of boutique firms. There's just so many resources on management consulted for you to support with your consultant career journey as well. If you ask which one is better, both management consulted and case coach are both excellent resources. As a Cornell student, as I mentioned, you have access to both of these resources. As an advisor, myself, I always go back and forth of both resources because although they're both very similar, they provide slightly different information as well. For example, management consulted goes over a lot of different trends or news articles or workshops that case coach does not have. It's more of a preference, but both resource is available to you as a student. The next resource is the Vault guides. Vault was formerly called firsthand. Vault is a lot of resources and virtual guides to help you understand or research different industries or future careers. Once you log in, you can click on the different libraries of guides that you can visit. They talk about different employers, different career paths, how to prepare for those specific career paths. As you can see in this screenshot, they have information about Bain, which is one of the companies that we identify before. Within that specific Bain guide. It talks about the industry, the culture, what different types of roles or positions that they have and how to prepare for that process. They have a lot of consultant guides as well, so step by step guides of what to expect when you're preparing for consulting careers. Even if you're not interested in consulting or have a slight interest of other fields, the Vault is a really good resource for you to explore and learn about different career paths as well. The forge is a really good resource to get direct learning experience or project experience from leading companies to gain valuable career readiness skills. These experience are all virtual experiences that take a few hours to complete. Within the forge page, they have job simulations across different industries and companies. In this specific screenshot, I filtered out the consultant job simulations. As you can see, they have a few top companies that we identify earlier before. Once you complete these virtual job simulation, you do get a certificate. And you can actually put that on your resume and talk about that experience because it's a project that you completed independently. So you can have that on your application materials or also talk about those experiences to your employer, to the recruiter or during an interview. Because this is still real life experience. A lot of employers actually promote these job simulations for students to gain a better understanding of what to expect in the role and to gain some more experience. Some next steps is identify different roles and experience that interest you. You want to explore the platforms to help you develop your skills or find opportunities. You want to reflect on the skills that you bring or want to develop. You want to organize your applications. You can connect with people to explore your interests and learn from others, and you want to prepare application materials. You can always schedule appointment with your career advisor from your home college or with anyone from our central office. You can connect with Cornell Career Services in Barnes Hall. So our office is available Monday through Friday, 8:00 A.M. To 4:30 P.M. You can schedule appointment with us and follow our Instagram, so you can stay up to date of any workshops or opportunities that we want to promote. Some services that we provide is resume, cover letter, linkedin reviews, practice interviews, we do behavior and case interviews. We do a lot of advising exploration topics, assessment, if you're unsure of what are your interests or your strengths. And we do have a lot of meetings offered for job and internship search if you need guidance from there. You can always connect with Barnes Hall or your college career office as well.