Each year, hundreds of HBS students walk across the Commencement stage anticipating a near-term career in management consulting. In addition, many more also prepare to enter other careers where their roles will be more advisory than operational. Often with only limited work experience as analysts or, in most cases, no background whatsoever, these students face a daunting set of challenges. Never has a career in consulting been more competitive or uncertain: a down market has led firms to curtail hiring and lower the threshold for termination, developments in AI raise questions about the fundamental value of the individual consultant. Bright students who could once rely on introductory firm training and apprenticeship learning to transition to a role as a skilled advisor to executives have much less opportunity to differentiate themselves from the pack. This course thus aims to bring these students one step closer to mastering the skills they will need to navigate their successful post-MBA roles as advisors and counselors in the face of challenging headwinds.

After a successful inaugural semester as a full-term course, Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills (MCAS) is transitioning to a half-term structure to maximize effectiveness. Based on alumni feedback, a half-term structure will better MCAS to distill key learnings and address target skills to take students interested in a consulting career to the next level. The course will be offered in both the Fall and Spring to address two target groups within the EC: in the Fall, amidst recruiting, prospective consultants; in the Spring, once offers have been made, students intending to go into advisory and consulting roles.

This course was developed as part of an independent project by three HBS students in partnership with Senior Lecturer David Fubini. Professor Fubini spent 34 years at McKinsey & Company, ultimately establishing and heading the firm’s Boston office, as well as leading a number of critical organizational and strategic practices. With his guidance, the student group generated a list of topics they wanted to master and questions they yearned to answer, all in the service of doing high-quality work that was impactful and meaningful not only for their clients and firms, but also for themselves. This list became the structure for the course themes, topics, and cases, which was further refined in partnership with members from the inaugural 2023 cohort. The course design also builds on the historically successful EC course Professional Firm Management, and leverages learning from the Leading Professional Services Firm Executive Education course. The outcome is a course curated by and for aspiring-consultant students and taught by a deeply experienced practitioner.

MCAS seeks to help students gain a comprehensive knowledge of the tools, skills, frameworks, and mindsets required to be successful across all facets of their advisory/consultative roles. While many consulting firms’ initial training programs highlight the skills required to complete key tasks—performing analyses, building models, crafting presentations—they are, by necessity, short and introductory only. This course goes deeper. Grounded in the understanding that relationships are paramount to success as an advisor, this course priorities the client relationship, in addition to how to manage teams, partners, firm politics, and the consultant’s life and career. Understanding the complexities of the role, this course will present students with complex and difficult situations to develop strategies for dealing with pressing, industry-specific dilemmas. The course covers this material through a mix of cases, workshops, discussions, and a final paper.

This course serves to provide students with a pragmatic lens to consulting in order to create a comprehensive toolkit they can use to bring differentiated value to their firms. Importantly, it does so in a foundational way that will build on summer internships and other consulting experiences while still remaining accessible to interested newcomers. With this course, students can start their careers with a meaningful set of skills they can apply before formalized training even begins. Put simply, this course will help students master consulting and advisory skills.

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