Thanks for adding all that and taking the time to write a detailed report about your experiences.

Very good article. I’ve worked 2.5 years in strategy consulting (not MBB though) and about the same time in corporate strategy at a global fortune 500 so far. And what you wrote describes my experience to 80-90%. Especially, the work stream distribution, team sizes, compensation, and seniority levels paint a very accurate picture from my point of view.

For the remaining 10-20%, I just want to mention a few caveats:
– I wouldn’t call it internal management consulting, since many large corporates have dedicated internal consulting arms (which are more often than not PMO teams). I would think of it rather as a SWAT team for the management board. While we have recurring/ongoing topics (e.g., annual corporate strategy update), we often jump in when necessary, especially if it’s a topic with high visibility
– Depending on the size of the team, you may or may not be involved in implementation work. We for example are half a dozen and don’t have the bandwidth to do that
– If you want to find out if a corporate strategy team has real impacts vs. being a support team, I would try to find out if they are reporting directly to the CEO. This may be the best indicator for having real teeth in the organization
– Depending on the size of the organization you may be involved more or less in business-relevant projects. Larger organizations with several businesses will have a corporate strategy team, a business strategy team for each business unit, and sometimes even strategy teams on a product-group level within each business unit. Such a structure doesn’t allow for a deeply involved corporate strategy team in the businesses. But on the other hand your area of responsibility is very clear cut: You will be working on corporate-level topics, which can be working with other central functions such as M&A (if separate), CFO, HR, investor relations, comms, or working on cross-functional business strategies if there is no natural owner for a topic or it is high on the management agenda
– Our work is rather cyclical, so sometimes we do have downtime. It tends to peak with quarterly results and we have a bit of downtime during summer and winter vacation periods (I’m in Europe)
– Progression is sometimes not given. For us, we are expected to join the team for a couple of years and then move into the organization
– Also the exit opps describe an accurate picture to me. I just want to mention for option 1) moving somewhere in the organization is the most common one, usually bringing you into another strategy team, e.g. business strategy. In terms of returning to consulting, yes that happens, but I personally see it rarely. Because in corporate strategy you work from time to time with external consultants and get to see first hand how little impact they really have. Also they have much less industry-expertise than yourself. So you would need to become a re-believer in that system and grind long hours knowing that much of that will lead nowhere

Having said that, consulting was the perfect entry to corporate strategy. I personally enjoy the job on a day-to-day level a lot (lots of high-impact interesting work, often for management board or board of directors), but it’s not a great platform to launch your career in the organization. Since you have little operational experience (e.g., in sales, operations,…) you tend to be seen as ivory tower which makes moving around difficult. I personally, will use exit option 3) and go to business school and see where it takes me, because 1) I don’t want to go deeper in the organization due to politics and red tape, 2) I don’t believe I’d have the same learning curve again if I’d just do corporate strategy elsewhere (this option does make sense if you want to change industry), and 4) I cannot imagine going back to consulting with what I have seen. But I would make the same decision every day of the week and join it for the great learning experience. You’ll understand how a large corporate works, how you have real impact in the organization, and you’ll get a great deep-dive into your chosen industry.

Hope this helps anyone.

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I need job from Canada please help me

Thanks for adding that.

Teams that are the center of gravity and really work on high altitude strategy (where this type of thinking and analysis is valued) will be more compelling from a work experience and comp pov.

Thanks. No, sorry, I do not. We do not usually go into the details of specific companies in these career articles.