I had joined BCG as a PPO holder from IIM Ahmedabad. One of my reasons of doing MBA was getting into top tier management consulting firms, but I worked at BCG for ~7 months, before leaving to join as a Product Manager in a startup. This blog will detail out the reasons of how I took this decision.
BCG as any other top consulting firm, is a GREAT firm for one’s career.
Before I delve into the reasons of why I left consulting, I would request you to watch videos on consulting as a career - where I talk all about why consulting is a great career that you should consider.
The key points being - it has amazing diverse projects you can work & learn in, the peer group is super smart & you are pushed to perform your best & extend boundaries of what you can do, the learning curve & growth curve is super amazing, you work on big high impact projects & deal with really big people and the exit options are great.
But no career suits everyone
As any other career, it is not a career that suits everyone. While I loved the impact we were making, I did feel like I was missing something.
The key reason why I left consulting was: I was working on someone else’s problem statement, the company or product was not really mine. So while the impact was generally high I did not really have the ownership of the actual problem. That mattered a lot. In a PM career or any other career in general, you are the one who deals with the problem & also has to deal with the repercussions of any solutions you deploy. That was missing.
Another reason was because you are working for an external client, you really have to be available at client’s terms. Hence I had no scope of flexibility in my daily life. If I’ve to get some bank work done, I will have to take a leave. There was almost no scope of WFH with certain clients, basically it was very dependent on the project you have or the client you have. And I did want to spend some good amount of time on my wellbeing, which was tough in consulting.
The last thing was the precedence or culture of giving it your all. If there are days when you don’t have to deliver a lot there was a culture of still pushing and moving something or the other, this is due to consulting being an external facing profession where you’ve to justify your value to the client. I was not a fan of this culture, and while it is great for learning & understanding how to manage high pressure situations, I didn’t want to stay in that environment for long.
All in all, consulting made me meet some amazing people within and outside BCG, some of the smartest people I know are crushing it in consulting. And it is a great field for excellent career progression, but I didn’t feel it was for me, and I got an amazing opportunity, which escalated my exit from the industry.
So that was it, very candidly, why I left BCG. Do not take this as an advice of why not to get into consulting, but just some thoughts that crossed my mind while making my decision.