Consulting firms are a growing group of recruiters of business students.
When a famous two-wheeler company in south India released their most-fuel-efficient model into the market, to the surprise of every business strategist, it could not pick up sales. The case was referred to a premier management institution, where the faculty made a survey and found the reason to be that the product had been launched in the wrong market. When they could do it with minor modifications, the two-wheeler was a big hit among rural people to that extent it has become an icon of rural customers.
BUSINESS OF CONSULTING
This is “consulting.” The consulting process helps businesses find strategic, sustainable and pragmatic advisory services for individuals and companies of private and public ownership. The consultant needs special skills, such as interpersonal skills, industry knowledge and analytical skills to address the client’s challenges. Consulting happens from different areas of expertise, where it involves two critical dimensions of client’s organisation: technical and human. These dimensions make business consulting crucial in preparing a management student to identify and define a problem, gather data, analyse it with creative problem-solving tools, recommend solutions to the business dilemma and advise or implement the desired transformation in the organisation. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has identified consulting as a major tool in various sectors of economy to sustain business across the world and helped in setting up small-to-independent consulting services through its technical cooperation projects.
Handling a consulting job requires a management graduate to use interview techniques, diagnose the client’s problems and objectives, structure the work to be done, share information and knowledge with the client and, finally, present a proposal. Most business schools facilitate the development of leadership skills, research techniques and planning tools in their first-year curriculum. Now, the top three consulting firms in India — Bain, BCG and Mckinsey — are catering to the companies in the fields of transportation, consumer products, private equity supply chain management and entertainment.
Boutique consulting firms focus on certain niche markets. Ultimately, all of them employ management students and train them as interns to become experts in this upcoming field. Business consulting as a course is more critical to management students who can make forays into international business exposures in multicultural workplaces to bring in a positive change in the corporate world. Consulting companies recruit students from campuses through the normal process of numerical tests, fit interviews and case interviews.
The most important skills that a consultant needs are structured thinking, business judgement, personal impact, leadership, drive, motivation and written communication. All these are added advantages to a management student who wish to join the stream of consulting. Management students are trained in organising events; they are good at social skills and widen their network as part of their curriculum. Hence the focus of management students who are ambitious to face critical strategic challenges is to undergo a business consulting course.
