I have returned from training (or I did two days ago and have been too busy to blog about it). I’m still astonished at the amount of resources that consulting firms are willing to invest in training their employees, especially since many consultants eventually leave to do other things (including *gasp* working for other consulting firms).
With regards to the training itself, while I wouldn’t say anything we learned in particular stood out, the things that stood out most to me were:
- Use of Examples – When our training group laid out “team norms” for our week and a half training session, I had insisted that training focus more on illustrative examples rather than teaching concepts. It’s not that I don’t like abstract concepts – I was considering theoretical biology for graduate school after all – but there is a significant difference between understanding a concept in abstract (i.e. demand slopes downward) and knowing how and when to apply it (i.e. using the slope of a demand curve to figure out an optimal pricing strategy, figuring out why prices are changing in a market) and a significant difference in one’s ability to remember an illustrative discussion versus a theoretical one.
- Group Exercises – Almost every training day ended in a late night group exercise, where every training group was given an assignment to complete by the end of the night to present the following morning. While this cut pretty significantly into my sleep time, it was, in some ways, the most effective training I received. While the analyses themselves were never that difficult to perform (although given some of the wilder results in our corporate valuation contest, maybe more difficult for some than others), the key take-away I received came from having to assume more senior roles in our case team. Given our independence, we became not only responsible for the quality and timeliness of our analysis, but were also responsible for work-planning, prioritization and division of labor, and the integration of separate pieces of work from different people into one final package. This represented a major shift in perspective, and hopefully, a critical element of my future relationships with more senior colleagues.
- Presentation Skills – I have not changed my view on the downsides of slide-umentation, and while I consider practice in consulting-style slide construction to be one of the less desirable things I gained from training, the need to present the results from the group exercises were very useful in revisiting my own approach to presentation construction. Although they were just simulated client presentations, the exercise in presenting to client senior management required us to take a more executive approach in deciding how and what to present. While this may seem obvious, I’ve found that it’s pretty difficult to “take a step back” from the analysis that I spend hours thinking about to consider precisely what (and how to convey that insight) a senior executive needs.
- People – I met a lot of great people who work at the firm, and I’m looking forward to continuing to correspond with them in the future.
And now, back to my spreadsheets!