The combination of long hours, travel, high work intensity, and stress can affect consultants' physical and mental health, as well as their relationships and family lives. As a result, many choose to leave consulting in search of a better work-life balance. Work-life balance is the most common reason to leave consulting. The work in senior management consulting firms is often stressful and very intense, with work weeks of 60 to 80 hours, more than in most positions in the market.
The desire to help people follow the same path, join these prestigious consulting firms, learn the best and most transferable professional skills and earn an almost unquestionable brand, has led to the founding of this same platform, MConsultingPrep, which offers complete materials for every step of hiring a consultant, from the curriculum to the last case interview. This “problem” is further compounded by the company's choice of candidates: management consulting firms hire high-performing, fast-learning people, many of whom tend to get bored if they get stuck in the same job for too long. Consultants often leave the position when they have reached a “stalled” point in their learning curve (that is, when they can learn very little from consulting work, even with large amounts of effort). If you like to work hard, you have those social skills that help you to be an effective consultant, you like to learn, you are interested in different types of businesses and problem solving, consulting can be a great profession.
In fact, managers who hire their consultants on Saturdays and Sundays are almost always rated negatively. In other words, the same type of people that consulting firms need are the people who will leave those consulting firms. The reasons why consultants can receive such high offers are the broad set of skills they acquire in consulting work (such as their experience in top corporate management or their ability to influence people and negotiate), as well as the brand of their former employers (including MBB in your resume gives you a lot of bragging rights, and with good reason). Management consultants can easily receive offers that pay 50 to 100% more than their consulting salary after only 2 to 4 years working at McKinsey, BCG, or Bain; these offers usually come from large corporations, technology startups, or the financial industry, but they're not the only options for a consultant who's already working.
Management consulting is an industry that provides expensive and professional advice to organizations to increase their overall performance through better management. The same mentality and culture that make consultants unique and so efficient are also part of their “weaknesses”: Consultants tend to place too much emphasis on structure.
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