How consulting lost its cool

Consulting firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are no longer the draw they once were for younger workers.

For one young woman who joined Accenture right out of college, consulting was a crash course in the corporate world. She became a whiz with tools like Excel and Tableau and she learned how to speak to executives.

Over her four years at the firm, though, she grew tired of the rote nature of her work. Plus, she said, she was often brought in just to validate a client’s own thinking.

“A lot of junior consultants don’t realize how many of these projects are actually already what I call ‘predestined,'” the woman, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her career prospects, told B-17. “There’s an end destination, but you kind of have to go through the motions, and that’s just super demoralizing for the people on the team.”

For decades, business students and MBAs looked to consulting because the work was high in pay and prestige. But a tough couple of years in the business, which have included layoffs and delayed start dates for new hires, have pushed some consultants — even some who’ve been at it a while — to reconsider a business once synonymous with generous expense accounts and stability.

The lure of other industries

The declining appeal of the consulting industry is most evident in the number of employees leaving.

Almost every major consulting firm has seen more workers leave than join over the past two years, said Jason Saltzman, the director of growth at Live Data Technologies, which collects real-time employment data.

And those who have been leaving are more seasoned than those who have left in years past. The tenure of departing consultants has increased by 7% in the past 18 months compared with the average over the previous decade.

One perk of consulting was that veterans could often parachute into adjacent industries or perhaps eventually land plum roles with former clients. Now, some departing workers are being lured away by the cachet of the tech industry. Five former consultants told B-17 that they transitioned to startups or venture capital after years at major consulting firms in hopes of finding more fulfilling work.

But perhaps an even more worrisome trend for the industry is that younger consultants are starting to view consulting firms as stepping stones to something better rather than a prestigious lifetime career.

“My parents are both entrepreneurs, so I have a deep respect for founders who are taking big risks to bring their ideas to life,” Jyothi Vallurupalli, a former McKinsey consultant who is now an investor at the venture firm Lightbank, told B-17. “When I was leaving consulting, I realized VC would allow me to partner with passionate founders across various industries from the early days of their journeys, and I saw it as an opportunity to contribute to building something meaningful.”

After leaving McKinsey in 2023, Ezra Gershanok founded the sublet startup Ohana. He’s since launched a four-week internship for college students interested in consulting.

“When I was an interviewer at McKinsey, one of the pillars that they would hire for was entrepreneurship,” Gershanok said. Now, he and his team market these internships to students as a “here’s how you could check that box in the interview process.” But, he said, many of the interns ultimately want to stay at Ohana or look for other startup jobs.

Gorick Ng, a Harvard University career advisor and the author of “The Unspoken Rules,” told B-17 that he’s seen an uptick in the number of students who intern with consulting firms but choose not to return for a full-time role.

He said some students would spend the bulk of their undergraduate years angling to land an internship at a big firm — preparing for interviews, attending information sessions, doing coffee chats, and networking with alums — only to learn once they got the internship that the work wasn’t for them.

Ng said many students soon realize that the thrill of landing a prestigious job often fades. What matters more is whether the work is appealing. “Is this a day-to-day that I would find fulfilling, and is this something that I can really see myself doing long term?'” Ng said.

A rough time for consulting firms

Even consultants who have been at it for a while are leaving the industry.

Matt Sternberg is the COO of Accelerant, a startup that connects insurance underwriting firms to financial institutions. Before joining the company in 2023, Sternberg spent a decade at Boston Consulting Group, a top-tier firm in the industry. He left the firm as a managing director and partner.

Sternberg told B-17 that he’s heard from former colleagues — including people who’ve been a partner longer than he had — who are inquiring about life beyond consulting. That’s different from when he left in 2022, when there was a pandemic-fueled boom for consulting work. Now, people are “looking externally” more than they were in previous years, he said.

Sternberg believes his former industry cut staff too deeply in 2023, during what was a “really challenging year” for the business.

“I worry they have started to erode their culture,” he said, adding that some firms also pulled back on benefits.

A recent post on Reddit from someone who said they work for a Big Four consulting firm in London said one reason people might be tempted to give up on the industry is that remote work can make it harder to connect with colleagues — the main thing that made the job bearable, the poster said.

“Constantly tapping away from in front of my screen on my kitchen table in a shared flat is more depressing than 1,000 cringe pizza parties,” the person wrote. A cutback in perks like flights to client offices and expensed dinners also makes the work less attractive.

Consulting is not the launching pad it used to be

Consulting hasn’t lost its allure for everyone, of course.

That’s clear from the number of applications the big firms receive. A McKinsey spokesperson told B-17 in July that the firm plans to hire fewer than 1% of those who apply. The company gets about 1 million résumés each year.

Ernst & Young received over 4 million applications in the past year and hired about 140,000 people, Irmgard Naudin ten Cate, EY’s global talent attraction and acquisition leader, told B-17 in July.

Yet even as many people try to add a big-name firm to their résumé, some outside the industry are less interested in attracting erstwhile consultants.

Atli Thorkelsson, who helps startups recruit at the venture-capital firm Redpoint Ventures, told B-17 that founders often looked to people with a consulting background for generalist roles, such as a chief of staff or someone who could be a sounding board for a startup CEO who might have a good idea but not a lot of business experience.

But lately, Thorkelsson said, he’s seeing “less excitement” from founders about workers who have consulting on their résumé than there was about five years ago.

Even as the industry’s pull fades, giving up a lucrative job that can be tough to land isn’t necessarily easy. “When I was transitioning out of consulting, consulting was actually still all the rage. It’s like high prestige, high pay,” the former Accenture consultant said. “That part was scary, to be honest.”