OT: Career advice
- Thread starter Vinny DeAngelo
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I work in the profession. Few things... 1. If stress bothers you now, you might want to think again. I don't know what you currently are doing, but chances are it doesn't compare. Clients pay 3-600 for hour of MC time (depends on many things); there is high expectation work is tight from their POV but more so from internal management. 2. You'll have new "boss" every project. They vary re style. 3. Travel depends but diet will definitely take a hit. It's totally feasible to make that part work, but people often struggle.
Lastly, I wouldn't get too excited by your friends comments. Depends on the firm, of course, but many do disproportionate amount of recruiting out of college or b school. These often best schools, which isn't relevant here, but sets baseline for talent expectations for external hires like you. Friend might get you a look or an interview - you'll still need to win the interview
I'm not getting my hopes up too much, though I have heard that networking is a way bigger factor in consulting than in a corporate job. Also, I have a top 20 MBA. I know I'm not going straight out of business school but it's not like I don't come from that world. Also, this isn't MBB by a long shot, so it's not nearly as competitive, I would think.
I agree. The opportunity to travel on someone else's dollar should seriously be considered. You'll see the country / world, rack-up frequent flier mileage / points across airlines, rental car companies, and hotels, making it more affordable to take vacations later. Maybe you'll get to take in a lot of hockey games in far away markets during your travels...
You'll meet interesting people, not only in your work, but in the periphery.
Regarding the diet... If your attitude towards eating is healthy, you'll do fine.
Regarding the relationship, or lack there-of... If you're not in one now, why is this an issue? Travel is an opportunity to meet other people in other walks of life. And in those walks, you may meet your wife. I'd consider not traveling if I had a significant other and the travel was going to put the kaibash on the relationship going forward.
Thanks! And as I said this is really putting the cart before the horse. Just having someone work somewhere doesn't mean shit. Though as I said I heard consulting companies put a lot of weight into networking.
Good stuff. I'm not trying to dissuade you by any means, just pointing out few facts about the work which may run counter to your original post.
Networking is a huge component of the profession - it is how you land your specific projects, areas you focus in, and eventually build a market for yourself. It's very important for on campus recruiting because there's a billion applicants. For off campus recruiting, the bigger challenge (statistically, via my experience seeing where the attrition occurs) is the interview process.
Where are you looking?
The travel aspect of consulting is really being romanticized here.
Sure, there are some great opportunities (when I was in Liberia for work I met a bunch of McKinsey guys that were there working with the utility to improve the electricity grid). But most of it involves spending your entire day locked in a conference room on a laptop.
I would say sales has a far more ‘glamorous’ opportunity to travel than most consultants do. And most sales people get sick of that pretty quickly too.
Sure, there are some great opportunities (when I was in Liberia for work I met a bunch of McKinsey guys that were there working with the utility to improve the electricity grid). But most of it involves spending your entire day locked in a conference room on a laptop.
I would say sales has a far more ‘glamorous’ opportunity to travel than most consultants do. And most sales people get sick of that pretty quickly too.
I'm not really looking anywhere, this is just something I have in back of my mind because it came up yesterday.
In my line of work, travel is expected but it isn't what I do all the time. I am not in a Willy Loman position.
When travel ops do come up, it's as a contractor to perform a task. Sometimes it's a week; sometimes it's a month; sometimes it's been a long-term-assignment.
Contracting may not be glamorous, but my retirement account thanks me for taking those contracting gigs.
Yeah, and I realized that that's why I was never like "travel, woohoo!". But it's still a change of pace from a regular life. A bit of a break from the monotony. Or it could feel oppressive.
HatTrick Swayze
Just Be Nice
This is going to make me sound more negative than my post I am still working on but here’s an idea of the weekly schedule.
This is an average week when staffed on a project. This is MY experience, yes you can find cushier gigs.
Monday:
3:40 AM Wake Up
6:00 AM Flight to Client
9:30 AM (boo lose hour) Arrive at client site
9:30-7:30 PM Sit in Conference Room w Team (not a lot of privacy so you are always on the grind)
7:30 PM Go to Dinner w Team or Hotel depending on how things went / workload
8:30-11/12/4AM Work at hotel
11PM/12AM/4AM - 6AM Sleep
Tuesday/Wednesday:
6AM Wake Up
6AM - 7AM Workout (if have time / energy, Partner is usually up and sending emails at 5AM)
7AM - 8AM Eat, Get Ready, Travel to Client
Repeat Monday
Thursday:
Repeat Tuesday/Wednesday
3:30PM Leave for Airport
3:30 - 8PM Travel Time (yay hour back); on a good day I can grab a drink on the plane, surf the web, and listen to music. On a bad day I am 100% plugged in working the entire time. On a horrible day I need to be plugged in but the plane WiFi is down
8PM Arrive home, confirm my girlfriend has not moved out. Eat, unpack.
9PM+ Potential work time or chill time depending on workload
Friday:
Typically go in to office to connect with people I haven’t seen all week. I am also more productive. And it is a 15 min walk.
Typical Friday office day is 830 - 4, occasionally leave early for a team event (ie drinking) or have to work til 8/9
Weekend:
Depending on the state of things and my Partner’s (Partner at firm not my GF haha) mood/schedule will have anywhere from 0-10 hrs of weekend work to get done but 15+ hrs of work to do if I actually want to get ahead and or do things to get promoted
~25-50% of the time my computer stays closed all weekend
Sunday scaries set in after noon when I realize that if I want 8 hrs of sleep before my Monday slight I need to be asleep before 8PM like a damn toddler
Greg02
Registered User
- Jun 28, 2009
- 4,536
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I don't work in consulting, but I'm in a fairly similar role. The diet and relationship bits get harder, but if they're important to you, people can and do make it work. Everyone has their own view on travel (as you can tell from this thread I'm sure). Personally I don't love it, but as long as I get chunks of time in NY, I find it an acceptable part of my job.
I divide stress into two categories, good stress and bad stress. Good stress is pressure to perform. Client needs this feature as soon as possible. Something is broken, fix it. There's a deadline, there's a lot of work to do, and you need to step into the moment. If "good" stress persists forever without a break, it becomes a negative, but I generally enjoy situations like this. I know my work has a lot of this, and I'm pretty sure consulting does too. If this sounds bad to you, that's a flag.
Bad stress is stress of circumstance. Your team sucks, or the client is a nightmare to work with, or your manager is checked out and you can't get her to unblock you. I think that consulting probably has roughly average amounts of this– you can have bad coworkers or managers anywhere. Clients can be great or they can be terrible, but you switch projects a lot so it ends up average.
I really hate the "what will you regret more, doing it or not doing it" argument, but reading your post it definitely jumps at me that you want this job. Worst case. you hate it and find something new with a nice resume item and a higher salary baseline, right?
Pretty much nailed it. Although it gets much easier (a) as you move up, and (b) if your not traveling.
Yeah, I don't know if I want it for the wrong reasons. Like a major reason is because I'm an MBA and I want an MBA job. But the MBA is a sunk cost no need making things worse. But yeah I'm leaning towards yes if I ever get the opportunity. Thanks.
When I say an MBA job, I mean the type of companies and roles that recruit at top MBA schools. Technically a custodian can be an MBA job if we're going by the jobs MBAs get.
I agree with this. I deal with a lot of stress in my line of work and would historically over-think / worry about every little thing. I've now got two little ones, and since first was born, I've dramatically improved professionally. Less Fs to give, don't sweat small stuff, focus on what's important, etc.
So I'm trying to revamp our weekly sales staff reports. As is, it's a huge nuisance that they keep adding shit to and has me in the office on Fridays late every week. The worst part is the busy work that takes up a shitload of time and I frankly only partially do because it's too much. My boss created the report using data tables. All of the data is in data tables. This presents a problem, there's a lot of turnover amongst the salespeople, we're adding and deleting people all the time. I also now have a million different reports to do. So I have to sit there manually deleting and adding people from multiple reports every damn week because that's the limitation of data tables. Of course, I end up not doing it in places. Thankfully, I work with cool people and no one has given me shit for it. But it's shoddy work. His only suggestion is to do it Monday through Thursday. But I have other shit to do. And it's still unnecessary busy work.
So I've been working on overhauling the report. I've created a process that indirectly uses pivot tables and gets rid of two pains in asses. 1) As I mentioned every time someone leaves or joins the company I won't have to manually change every data table. I get to change it in a handful of central locations and refresh the pivots. 2) I figured out a process of not having to sort the pivots. This was the other part that took too much time. I had to sort EVERYTHING. Well, one problem with pivot tables is that it can't always sort what you need and this was a scenario where I couldn't. Well now, not only do I not have that problem, I figured out a way that I don't even HAVE to sort to begin with and can just refresh the pivots.
All in all, this will take some time, but I'm well underway. However, there are two questions I have for the gang:
1) My boss doesn't know how to use pivot tables (his excel skills otherwise are good) and he doesn't want to learn. He HATES them. He's AFRAID of them. He's not happy about me using pivot tables. He was upset about it from the start. But I showed it to him after I already finished only one tab. Then he said I better not have it in the other tabs. I told him, I'm not going to manually clean the report every week and stay late every Friday. Particularly if I can help it. He's looking to hire someone else, I got a bit combative and said if I can't do it this way then the new person he hires should delete and add all these people. Off the record, my paycheck is shit and I don't appreciate staying late every Friday (though I do get overtime). I also don't appreciate doing shoddy work, which is obviously largely due to me, but largely due to how overwhelming this project has become.
I plan on doing it and forcing his hand. Any other suggestions in this? I'm putting my foot down. There's no reason to make this project more painfully and lengthy than it needs to be because my boss has a phobia of one of the simplest things excel has to offer.
2) I think this is a cool process that I'm doing and don't want to have it go to waste in the future when I likely look for a higher paying job. Overhauling the process isn't easy and figuring out why to do the sorting trick, for example, took a decent amount of time and effort. It's somewhat outside the box and I'm proud of it. However, changing a report to perform the same process that it already does a) doesn't sound like it had as much impact as someone would like to read on a resume and b) sounds a little too granular than something that should go in a resume or be spoken about in an interview.
How do I leverage this experience? As process improvement? With what result? Time saved? I've done a lot easier shit that sounded much sexier and I'd like to position this as something significant if I have the chance.
Sorry for the long post, thanks for your help!
So I've been working on overhauling the report. I've created a process that indirectly uses pivot tables and gets rid of two pains in asses. 1) As I mentioned every time someone leaves or joins the company I won't have to manually change every data table. I get to change it in a handful of central locations and refresh the pivots. 2) I figured out a process of not having to sort the pivots. This was the other part that took too much time. I had to sort EVERYTHING. Well, one problem with pivot tables is that it can't always sort what you need and this was a scenario where I couldn't. Well now, not only do I not have that problem, I figured out a way that I don't even HAVE to sort to begin with and can just refresh the pivots.
All in all, this will take some time, but I'm well underway. However, there are two questions I have for the gang:
1) My boss doesn't know how to use pivot tables (his excel skills otherwise are good) and he doesn't want to learn. He HATES them. He's AFRAID of them. He's not happy about me using pivot tables. He was upset about it from the start. But I showed it to him after I already finished only one tab. Then he said I better not have it in the other tabs. I told him, I'm not going to manually clean the report every week and stay late every Friday. Particularly if I can help it. He's looking to hire someone else, I got a bit combative and said if I can't do it this way then the new person he hires should delete and add all these people. Off the record, my paycheck is shit and I don't appreciate staying late every Friday (though I do get overtime). I also don't appreciate doing shoddy work, which is obviously largely due to me, but largely due to how overwhelming this project has become.
I plan on doing it and forcing his hand. Any other suggestions in this? I'm putting my foot down. There's no reason to make this project more painfully and lengthy than it needs to be because my boss has a phobia of one of the simplest things excel has to offer.
2) I think this is a cool process that I'm doing and don't want to have it go to waste in the future when I likely look for a higher paying job. Overhauling the process isn't easy and figuring out why to do the sorting trick, for example, took a decent amount of time and effort. It's somewhat outside the box and I'm proud of it. However, changing a report to perform the same process that it already does a) doesn't sound like it had as much impact as someone would like to read on a resume and b) sounds a little too granular than something that should go in a resume or be spoken about in an interview.
How do I leverage this experience? As process improvement? With what result? Time saved? I've done a lot easier shit that sounded much sexier and I'd like to position this as something significant if I have the chance.
Sorry for the long post, thanks for your help!
Kane One
Registered User
Can you utilize something more advanced than excel, one which doesn’t require so much manual input?
What you’re currently doing doesn’t sound like it adds much to your value. If you can learn something like Tableau or any free alternative, it would benefit your career and resume more than excel would.
Do you guys have any sort of database there such as SQL Server, Oracle, etc.? Having a good data model is pretty key. If you must use excel, I’d definitely recommend cutting down all the manual input to speed things up.
I also don’t really get this:
Can you have a separate table with every employee’s start and end dates and leverage this table so you can automatically filter the data down?
Also what type of report does your boss want to see which doesn’t involve pivoting?
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I know Tableau. Frankly, I don't think it's rocket science or even more challenging than excel. But I use excel at work like almost everyone. We don't use Tableau yet but it looks like we might soon. A guy I work with uses Python but I don't know it, been meaning to learn it.
I mean, I understand that excel isn't the most marketable thing but it's still pretty universal and is used pretty extensively in corporate finance.
I know SQL at a very beginner level but I'm sure I can pick it up.
I can create a separate table with employee start and end dates and hypothetically write a formula that makes it an N/A if "today" is after the end date. However, a) this only works if either all of the data tables are vertical or if the tables that are side by side, then all the employees must line up. Otherwise, you'll get rows hidden that align with terminated employees on one table and active employees on another. Unless the is a pivot table, which is what I did. b) This would still provide the need to manually hide the N/As every time a new person is terminated since you can't refresh data tables to automatically to take out the N/As. c) For data tables this wouldn't solve the problem of adding people which would still need to be done manually.
My boss wants to see this report with data tables as the final output and not pivot tables. I want to use a report that references pivot tables (although doesn't use them as a final product). If you're interested, what I did was create a ranker column for the metric I want to sort, concatenate with the names, pivot it based on the concatenated column and then have cells reference these tables using a formula that replaces the rank but keeps the name in ranked order.
Blueblood9
Registered User
I got a question. What would you advise a 36 yo engineer that is really starting to think of a career change?
Crease
Chief Justice of the HFNYR Court
- Jul 12, 2004
- 24,767
- 27,709
@SnowblindNYR
Busy work sucks (and I have no suggestions re your project), but the best way to make the most of busy work is to keep your ear to ground and deeply learn why your boss and the company care about the metrics you're generating.
Busy work sucks (and I have no suggestions re your project), but the best way to make the most of busy work is to keep your ear to ground and deeply learn why your boss and the company care about the metrics you're generating.
Emptyvoid
Registered User
- Apr 11, 2009
- 3,616
- 166
First thing is that I'd identify why you want to make a career change. The more detailed and honest you can be with yourself (the things you like about your career, the things you don't) the better you'll be able to identify an alternate career.
Who knows, by questioning yourself you might find out you don't need a career change but a different work environment that better suits you.
I understand why they care about them. I don't understand his fear of me changing the reports because he doesn't understand the method used.
Blueblood9
Registered User
Honestly i know the answer its the hours. Right now its nights weekends and 80hr weeks. The time and a half is awesome but at some point its not worth it. Might just be me venting though
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