The daily work is taking apart a messy question (“why is this division losing money?”), testing each part against evidence, and presenting a recommendation you can defend. Unlike most fields on this site, consulting has a well-marked front door: graduate schemes, defined interview formats, yearly intakes.
The lay of the land#
The industry has tiers. The strategy firms known as MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain) sit at the top of the prestige ladder. The Big Four (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG) are built on audit and tax but run large consulting arms. Below and beside them are boutiques specialising in one industry or function. You join as a business analyst, associate consultant or graduate consultant, work in small teams on projects lasting a few weeks to a few months, and the ladder to engagement manager and partner is explicit. The entry hurdle is the case interview, where you solve a business problem out loud. It rewards structured thinking and surfacing your assumptions, which philosophers practise anyway, and it’s learnable; the firms publish their own prep materials. Many people treat consulting as a first chapter and leave after two or three years for strategy roles, startups or policy, taking the toolkit and the network with them.
Philosophers who’ve done it#
- Dr Kevin Macnish — digital-ethics consulting senior manager at Sopra Steria. His role shows one route philosophers take into big consultancies: the ethics and responsible-tech practices growing inside them. He spoke at our October 2022 workshop
- Christine Jakobson — Associate Principal at Principia Advisory, where the advisory model is applied to ethics itself; see the Ethics Consulting guide
We haven’t run an event on mainstream strategy consulting yet. If you’ve made that journey, we’d like to tell your story.
From our events#
- From Philosophy to Ethics Consulting with Dr Kevin Macnish (October 2022) — the consultancy world seen from its ethics practice
Start here#
- Philosophy Means Business — the case for philosophers inside companies; the same argument works in consulting interviews
- Case-interview prep is free and public: every major firm publishes practice cases on its careers site
- If the ethics practices inside these firms are what interest you, read Ethics Consulting
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