Two graduates give advice on getting into consultancy

Consultancy firms are big graduate employers and can offer a competitive salary, but not a lot of people understand what consultants actually do. We asked Olivia Pierce, 23, who is an associate at OC&C Strategy Consultants, and Ann Hyams, 22 , who works for LEK Consulting to demystify the job a bit.

What does a strategy consultant do?

OP Overall you’re looking at ways of making a business more competitive and making that competitiveness more sustainable in the long term. You’re assigned to a particular project and your typical responsibilities at associate level will involve a lot of research into particular companies or industries, analysis of the data you find and presenting that data in a way that is understandable for your team and your client. As you progress further in a project the research becomes more analytical.

Have you always known you wanted to go into consulting?

OP I had no idea at school but it was well advertised at university. I like the fact that it is so broad. You can pick a firm that does retail, media, services and telecoms etc and you don’t have to specialise in a particular sector until you know what you want to do.

AH I didn’t know until I went to uni when I went along to some careers events. The variety especially appealed to me. There’s such a wealth of industries. You change projects every 4-6 weeks, although there are some larger ones. It is very research based but you’re researching different things all the time.

Do you have to have work experience in consultancy?

OP I did do 2 internships whilst I was at uni but neither were directly consultancy based. I don’t think this was a big problem though. What they’re looking for with consultancy is more general market awareness and there’s many different types of work experience which can contribute towards that. I would say that one of the things my firm specifically look for is where your work experience background is, where you interned and how you can apply the things you’ve learned before to your career in consultancy. I would definitely recommend doing some work experience while you’re at university.

AH I didn’t do consultancy specific internships but I think they’re a good idea if you know that’s what you want to do. I didn’t so I tried one in HR for example before I went into consultancy. I think it’s important that you do something so you appear career driven and look more knowledgeable when it comes to interviews. It’s important that you’re interested in business.

How did you make the most of your internship?

OP I think it’s worth taking some initiative in organising internships and once you have them really making the most of them by pursuing different options, asking for work and not just sitting there not doing anything. There’s definitely something to be said for maintaining contact with the people you meet because they’ll inevitably go into similar kinds of careers. Even if you don’t get a job there afterwards it’s definitely good to have some contacts under your belt with people from different fields. Also, it’s important to remember that Internships are an extended interview so you’ve got to present yourself in a way which makes them think “yes I do really want to work with this person on a full time basis.”

AH I think before you start doing an internship you might not realise how much people actually take in. So make sure you wear appropriate clothing and think about what people are wearing in the office. Everything from the moment you walk in the office is really taken on board by people including the way you act around the office and whether you’re taking initiative and asking for work. You’ve also got to take into account before you start work whether that particular place is somewhere you want to work, not just is this a job that I want to do.

What has surprised you about your job?

OP I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I am. Right from the start you are given lots of responsibility and particularly in the last project I did there was loads of client contact so you’re organising meetings and making contact directly. You do have to appreciate that it is long and hard work which I think is a bit of a shock to the system for some people.

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about strategy consultancy?

OP Sometimes people just associate strategy consultancy with long hours, Excel spreadsheets and not a lot of creativity. But at my firm there is an emphasis on work life balance and there is a social culture which I do really enjoy. There’s also a more creative side to it as well as it’s about putting your ideas forward and thinking outside the box because at the end of the day you are trying to help a business organise itself in a different way so that does require different insights.

AH I think there’s a general misconception about work that you have your work and you have your friends and those two things are separate. But I was very surprised as my firm organises things all the time. Your colleagues really are your friends as well which is really good if you’re working long hours.

Have you had a favourite moment so far?

OP I’ve only been working for 2 months but I have just finished a project where we had to go and present to senior management at a company and there were questions directed at me individually. Being able to answer those questions made me feel like I was contributing something to very high level management and I feel like my contribution has been valued and I’ve made a difference.

AH I’ve only been working for 3 weeks but the best thing for me is walking into the office every day and actually wanting to be there. Being able to see your slides in a presentation and thinking I can explain that because that’s what I worked for gives you a big sense of achievement for quite a little thing.

Click here for a video giving an introduction to consultancy.

Heading in the right Direction

Natalie in action at the New Diorama Theatre

Here at Pimp My Prospects, we have gathered advice from young people starting out in careers ranging from law to politics, banking to advertising so we thought it was time that we gave the arts a look in.

This is a recording of an interview that we did with Natalie, an up and coming young theatre director, who despite being only 20 years old, has just bagged herself the position of Associate Director at a prestigious London theatre.She talks about what it is like to get in to the career at a young age, and tells us what advice she would give to her 16 year old self.

For those of you who dream of a life backstage, here’s a firsthand account of how to do it.

If at first you don’t succeed…

The first step on the career ladder is one that people seem to worry about the most, but what is often lost sight of is that the career that you start out in is not necessarily going to be where you end up.

Here at Pimp My Prospects we know that getting that first job can seem a bit daunting, but we thought we’d take some time to reassure you that there are plenty of people that have gone on to be incredibly successful in their field who didn’t exactly have the best start in their careers…

Marilyn Monroe: A young Monroe was told by modelling agents that wasn’t pretty enough and should consider being a secretary, before going on to be recognised as one of the most iconic beauties of all time.

Monroe was told that she ought to consider becoming a secretary

Fred Astaire: In his first screen test, an MGM director wrote that Astaire, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” Astaire went on to become a movie legend, but he always kept that note in his Beverly Hills mansion to remind himself of his humble beginnings.

Vincent Van Gogh: Although his paintings now sell for hundreds of millions of pounds and are exhibited in all the most prestigious museums, Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime, and this was to a friend for a very small amount of money.

Bill Gates: Gates dropped out of Harvard and started a business called Traf-O-Data which flopped. Although his early idea wasn’t a success, he went on to found Microsoft.

Walt Disney: His cartoons have become classics and his characters loved all over the globe, but Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because, “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

Walt Disney was fired for not being imaginative enough

Thomas Edison: The famous inventor was told at school that he was “too stupid to learn anything” but went on to invent the lightbulb, after  over 1,000 unsuccessful prototypes had failed.

Elvis was told that he ought to be a truck driver

Winston Churchill: The wartime leader was defeated in every election for public office until he finally became the Prime Minister at the age of 62.

Steven Spielberg: The blockbuster director was rejected three times from the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television. 35 years later, he returned to University to get a BA in film studies.

Stephen King: Now one of the bestselling authors of all time, Stephen King’s first novel Carrie received 30 rejections. King threw the manuscript in the bin, but his wife managed to encourage him to fish it out and resubmit it.Elvis Presley: In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after just one performance saying “You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck.”The Beatles: The fab four were rejected by a recording company when they were just starting out, who said  “we don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”Soichiro Honda: Honda applied for a job as an engineer at  Toyota Motor Corporation and was rejected. He started making his own cars at home, and encouraged by his neighbours, started his own billion-dollar business.

Youny: An internet business case study

Following on in our series of features about young entrepreneurs, we thought we’d look at a new London-based start up called Youny.

The website, which is a venture set up by two entrepreneurial LSE students, is an idea made by young people for young people and is generating a buzz around London campuses.

The basic premise of the site is that it allows students to connect with each other and ask questions about their degree. “In particular, it is aimed at connecting students for the specific modules they are studying, as well as providing a more general network across universities. It combines elements of traditional social-networks with elements of existing virtual learning environments (VLEs) in achieving a new type of social-platform, geared expressly towards facilitating academic interactions.”

In translation: a fusion of the useful elements of forums like the Student Room and Yahoo answers, with all the flexibility of a social networking site.

So if you ever find yourself needing to know the answer to a question about your module but don’t want to bother everyone on Facebook, you can ask your coursemates on Youny. Or if you desperately need to know a deadline at an antisocial hour you can log on and search through the questions until you find the answer that you need, and give it a good rating if the answer proves useful.

And for those with tech-savvy teachers, Youny is also open to academics, who will be able to log on and answer any pressing questions.

Providing a handy way to stay in the loop with examination dates looming for students, this is a good example of students that saw a niche in the market, and decided to use their skills and knowledge to provide their own solution. The dedicated team behind the project is made up of students with knowledge and skill sets ranging from social networking to marketing, business skills and tech know-how.

The site is launching at UCL, KCL, Imperial or LSE at first, but if successful, has the potential to be rolled out across the country.

Co-founder Jamie Qiu said of the idea: “Youny is an online platform for academic peer tutoring. You know the age old saying about walking a mile in a man’s shoes? Well the truth is, thousands of students at your university have walked a mile in your shoes. They’ve taken the courses you are taking right now. So who better to help you get to the finish line then them? It’s all about bringing the student community together.”

To find out more about the concept, watch the video below. Or check out the website. And why not take inspiration from them? Have you got a great idea for a start-up? Why not get a team of skilled friends around you and come up with a business model? You never know where that idea could take you..

Cover Letter Hints and Tips

In our last post we looked at some of the basics of what makes a good CV.

Now in the second part of our hints and tips series we want to demystify the cover letter.

Q: What is a cover letter?

Sometimes sending a CV isn’t all you need to do for a job application, some employers want a letter attached to the CV explaining why you are applying and saying why you think you would be right for the job.

Q: How long should it be?

No longer than one A4 side, probably about four or five paragraphs.

Q: How should it be formatted?

The right hand side should have your address and the date at the top, then the name address and title of the person you are applying to on the left (see above.)

Q: What should it include?

Introduction: Say who you are, explain how you heard about the job and why you are writing.

Why the job: List the reasons that you are interested in the position, and what factors attract you to the company.

Why me: Explain why you would be suited to the job including your skills and experience without repeating the exact words on your CV. Think about what they are looking for which might be spelled out in the job advertisement.

Conclusion: Sign off by repeating that you are interested in the job and look forward to hearing from them, then end with Yours sincerely, and then your name.

Q: What makes a good cover letter?

Good spelling and grammar, enthusiasm for the job, and a well written explanation of why you would be suited to the job in question.

Oxford University has put some of its career advice online, including a section about CVs and cover letter. The letter above is an example that they give of how to write a speculative cover letter, ie one where you don’t know that there is a job on offer but you hope there might be. Check out their website for some more advice on job applications.

CV Hints and Tips

Here at Pimp My Prospects we try and listen to what you have to say to us, so when people responded to our quiz saying they would like to see some advice on CVs, cover letters and interviews, we listened. Here, in the first of three parts, is our series of hints and tips.

These are not meant to be a be all and end all guide to job applications, but are a collation of advice that we have been given by employers and will hopefully give a bit of help to those of you trying to understand the jargon that can surround what should be a simple process.

So here goes…

Q: What is a CV?

CV stands for curriculum vitae, a Latin phrase that roughly translated means ‘the course of one’s life’. You’ll sometimes hear Americans refer to it as a resume.

Your CV is a way of showing potential employers why they should hire you, a way of marketing yourself and pointing out why you are the right person for the job.

Q: When will I need a CV?

You’ll need to have a CV for most formal job applications, but it also might come in handy for speculative job applications, ie when no position has been advertised but you hope they might have a vacancy.

Q: How long should it be?

You should be able to fit it onto two A4 sides, any longer than that and you will start to bore people. This might mean taking out some of your experience that isn’t relevant to the particular job, or working on saying things more concisely.

Q: How should it be formatted?

The top of the CV should have your basic information on it; name, address, date of birth, email address and phone number.

After that the information should be laid out clearly and concisely with relevant section headings. If the font is smaller than 10pt it will be difficult to read, and if it is bigger than 12pt you might not have enough space to fit everything in.

Some CVs, for competitive industries like advertising, might start with an introductory profile but this is not essential.

The two main ways of ordering a CV are:

-Chronological: when you outline your achievements in date order, with the most recent first. This is clear and easy to put together, in fact it might be worth keeping a chronological CV for you own records, which you can update and use as the basis of any new job-targeted CV.

-Skills based: when you divide the information into sub headings based on sub-headings. This has the advantage of being able to highlight particular areas and breaks the information up into easily digestible chunks. Within these sections the information should still be ordered by reverse chronology.

Q: What information should it include?

The emphasis and order will change depending on the requirements of the job you are applying for, but some useful things to think about including are:

-Education and Qualifications: GCSE’s, A-levels, Degree subject and university, or any vocational qualifications.

-Work Experience: This is where you can show any experience that  is relevant to the job, or show what skills you have gained from doing other jobs. They don’t have to be paid or fancy, you might have done a paper round that shows that you are dedicated and a hard worker. Try and use action words such as developed or organised to emphasise your particular role and relate the skills you learnt to the job you are applying for.

-Interests and Achievements: This is where you can mention any prizes or awards, and talk about your hobbies.

-Skills: What other skills have you developed over the years that an employer might be interested in? Languages, computer skills, or anything else that you think might be interesting.

-References: Some bosses will want to talk to someone that knows you well, to see what kind of person you are and whether you would fit in well at the position or talk to some of your previous employers. Putting the name and contact details of one or two adults, your ‘referees’ who has agreed to do this for you at the bottom of the CV will strengthen your application.

Q: What are employers looking for in a good CV?

CVs are subjective, one person might love what another person hates, but there are some hard and fast rules for success.

-Make sure there are no spelling and grammar mistakes, get other people to check through it in case you missed something.

-Make it clear and concise, but with enough information to sum up why you would be good at the job

-Don’t just hand the same CV into two wildly different jobs, make sure it is targeted to the specific application and reflects the skills that you would have to offer if you got the job.

And finally, check out the video below, which explains the whole thing well.

Coming up.. how to write a cover letter.

Quiz results

Thanks to everyone who took part in our survey, we had a fantastic response. The results are in now and we thought that we ought to break the data down a bit to show you what we learned from the results. So here it goes.

Turns out that all the respondents came (unsurprisingly) from the British Isles, and most of you fell within the age boundaries that we are most interested in reaching, with the youngest answer coming from a 14 year old, while the oldest person to fill out a quiz was 23. The average age of participants was 18.

85% of people who filled out the quiz listed their employment status as ‘student’, 15% as ‘unemployed’. No one who filled out the quiz was in full or part-time employment.

Fairly obviously given the demographic and the number of Twitter referrals the quiz had, a staggering 90% had heard of the site through social media, 5% from Google searches and 5% from word of mouth.

So that’s you. but what about us? Going on to the longer answer questions, we had a good variety of answers to the questions ‘what have you found useful so far’ and ‘what do you want to see on the site’, although not everyone got this far in the quiz before submitting their responses.So what can we learn from the numbers so far? We can see that we are getting through to the right age group, 60% of you find us ‘very’ helpful and 40% ‘quite’ helpful, and if we manage to impress you, you tell your friends about our site via social media rather than face to face conversations. We also can learn that we have more work to do on our Search Engine Optimisation to make sure that if you want to find some help, we come high up enough in Google searches to catch your attention.

A  common theme was that although the advice from young people starting out in industries was particularly helpful, you also wanted some more generalised, straightforward hints and tips for writing CV’s, cover letters and going to interviews. You wanted to find out how people got into their internships not just into their jobs, and you liked the fact that we were showcasing advice from people who got their jobs within the last few years rather than 50 years ago.

Finally several of you mentioned that you liked the fact that we were doing something positive about the problem of youth umemployment.

So thank you for all your responses, and we’ll try to work on responding to your feedback in the content that we post in the future!

 

How are we doing, and how can we help? Take our quick quiz to let us know.

So it’s been several months since we set up Pimp my Prospects to try and help connect young people with help and information about careers.

So we want to know, how are we doing? What could we improve on? And most importantly, what do you want to see on the site?

Take our survey, let us know and we’ll do our best to sort it out for you.

QUICK QUIZ

All the best, the Pimp my Prospects team x

“You can never have too much experience,” Oprah Winfrey tells young PR graduate

A career in Public Relations is seen as fast-paced, fun and glamorous, but also competitive. We asked publicist Chloe Apter, who works at Dundas Communications, for some advice on how to get the all-important first job.

“I remember being about 16 years old and still at school, and an old girl came in to give a lecture about her career. At the time she was a features editor for a small magazine. She gave us the best advice I have ever gotten in the work world.

“If you’re asked to clean a cupboard, or organise a filing cabinet, make sure it is the cleanest, most perfectly organized cupboard or filing cabinet on Earth.” It might sound trivial, but she is now (only six years later) the Editor-In-Chief of one of the UK’s most fashionable and famous magazines.

Chloe Apter, who was given advice on her career in PR by Oprah Winfrey