Hi All,
Wondering how many of the posters on this forum work in / are applying for management consulting roles. If so, how have you applied the CFA to your work. Also, how respected is the CFA in the management consulting field.
Thanks!
I don’t work in management consulting, but they don’t care at all about CFA there.
I have four years experience in management consulting in DC. I passed level 1 in June, and am studying for level II for next June. The CFA charter is not that important in climbing the ladder in management consulting. People acknowledge that the exams are difficult, sure, but it’s not as important as day to day project work and experience working closely with clients. The equity analysis, PM, and derivatives aren’t all that relevant. The Quant Methods, corporate finance, and some of FRA are relevant. We often have to look at a client’s financial reports and analyze historical costs and revenues and business operations as background before building a financial model. Ethics is something which you can apply to any position/industry. Long story short, the charter is respected in any educated and well-informed workplace. It has the potential to enhance your day to day job performance, but it’s not a necessity. It’s not like they’ll deny you a promotion without it.
So just curious, what made you begin the CFA curriculum? Are you trying to get out of consulting altogether?
I’ve received an offer from M/B/B many years ago and have dozens of friends in strategy consulting, mostly at the engagement manager to partner level (basically friends from business school). CFA isn’t helpful and if you really wanted to work in a private equity or corporate finance practice within one of the consulting firms, you’re better off working in banking or private equity. The CFA doesn’t give you any of the practical know-how of these groups which include private equity due diligence, merger integration and synergy assessment, and an overall sensibility about whether deals make sense or how to model them. Things may be different if you were to want to work within a financial institutions or banking practice area within a strategy consulting firm, but I struggle to see why pursuing the CFA could be more valuable than investing your time actually working in the industry.
From someone that left investment banking for management consulting (reason: top tier clients, less hours, higher salary/title), MC doesn’t care about CFA at all. IMO MC is pretty terrible. It’s basically selling ‘solutions’ which is little more than powerpoints and some strategy that just reinforces what a manager was going to do anyways.
The point of management consulting is to cover the manager’s ass. If he chooses a risky or controversial strategy, he protects himself in the event of failure, or from lawsuits, by showing that McKinsey research supported the decision.
Exactly, we had management consultants from McKenzie visit us, they would hold meetings with us and understand what we are doing and then present the same to us in a fancy power point presentation. Even the suggestions they gave us were the ones we provided to them.
boards like 3rd party validation. it covers their butts from shareholder action.