Management consultancy dawned in 1893, when Frederick Winslow Taylor, perhaps one of the first management consultants in the world, started promoting himself as an expert who could enhance the efficiency of a business through a series of tailor-made management techniques.

In India, this profession bloomed in the late 1960s and early 70s when businesses clamoured for specialised services. Initially, management consultancy was only limited to areas like accounting manuals, systems, organisation structures, among others. As the clients’ requirements gradually mushroomed over the years, their eyes shifted to players who are integrated service providers.

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Given the skyrocketing demands for consultancy firms increasing with time and now fast forwarding to today’s modern times, we can see that almost every corporate business is hiring management consultants for resolving their most complex internal as well as external issues. Be it mergers and acquisitions, expanding geographical footprint or launch of new products. Rather, management consultancy has today become a topnotch career choice, even for graduates and freshers, who may someday land into the c-suite category.

The industry, since 2013, has witnessed an impressive average growth of 6.75 per cent. Today India has over 10,000, both big and small consulting firms. Adding to it is a large number of boutique consulting firms that excel in offering field-specific solutions.

However, these firms are facing impending challenges as well, such as rising completion, increasing unpredictability, growing need for new skills, among others despite the milestones and impressive growth figures. Also, unlike other professionals, management consultants usually don’t get the general benefits such as paid vacations, sick leaves, health insurance, to name a few. Besides, consultants do not have the pleasure of several state and federal laws protecting them from exploitation by employers.

How to begin?

For starters, you should possess a graduate degree or equivalent. Next, you should pursue Masters from the top MBA colleges such as XLRI – Jamshedpur, Symbiosis Pune, Christ College—Bangalore, to name a few. Speaking of IIMs, you must get good scores in the Common Admission Test (CAT). These scores will let you into almost all the IIMs; be it IIM Kozhikode, IIM Kolkata or IIM Lucknow. Those looking for pursuing MBA from reputed government universities can go for Delhi University, Mumbai University, Pune University, among others.

These universities, compared to the private or autonomous ones, charge less and yet are well-known for providing quality education. On the other hand, you can also opt for a one-year diploma, if you are planning for a short-term program. However, to excel in management consultancy, you must have relevant experience despite these degrees. But no doubt, a career in management consultancy surely comes with a promising salary package.

Skills of a good Management Consultant

Communication Skills: As a management consultant, you must have extraordinary communication skills to speak to people coming from diverse origins. The idea is to clearly explain the strengths and weaknesses to stakeholders and help them innovate. Be it internal or external stakeholder; senior manager, business developer or anyone with a higher designation. You can’t be a good management consultant if you can’t communicate your ideas and advice to benefit your stakeholders.

Listening and critical thinking skills: Going to the grassroots of any problem requires consultants to properly listen, ruminate and accordingly devise apt solutions after critical thinking. While listening to the problems, you must clarify your queries to have an in-depth understanding of the context. Besides, a management consultant requires good critical thinking skills to provide quick solutions to the issues. Hence, it’s a much-needed skill to excel in this domain.

Simplification skills: In this domain, you must know how to simplify the massive slot of problems by breaking them into smaller and solvable chunks. This is how you can prioritise the problems that need urgent attention and later concentrate on the rest. This is a better way of approaching your problems and resolving them at the earliest. Without simplifying the complex problems, you will always struggle to come out with a solution on time.

Tech skills: The future is going to be digital. This applies to consultants as well. With transforming technologies and trends, consultants must adopt the latest technologies methods to deliver instant solutions to clients. With the help of big data and analytics, a consultant can easily and quickly garner all the facts and figures, analyse them and produce right and effective outputs.

What does the future hold?

The consulting industry has seen overwhelming transformations till now. It will see more, in the coming days. And deep industry knowledge, specialisation and fast adoption of trends will forever play a principal role.

Humans go to doctors for health advisory. Similarly, businesses go to consultants for solutions to complex issues they face every now and then. The future seems quite promising and demands more skilled graduates to step into this field. The youngsters must be equipped with a unique set of skills than the average professionals. While the rapidly evolving business landscape will always pull businesses into the riddle of new challenges and opportunities, their success will always depend on their effectiveness to invest in the right talents – the right management consultants.

The writer is founder & MD, SL Consultants.