Mobile, Bright and Ambitious

As one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools, INSEAD offers participants a truly global educational experience. Their MBA programme has been ranked number one, across the globe, by the Financial Times.

For recruiting season, a thought that is never too far from any MBA graduate’s minds, the INSEAD Career Development Centre continually look to ensure that they bring relevant and insightful recruiting information to their Master of Business Administration (MBA) students, or Mobile, Bright and Ambitious as they are often termed, on a regular basis.

Investigo were honoured to be invited to speak at an evening seminar organised for the students at the business school based in Fontainebleau to give them a head-hunter’s insight into the UK market as it currently stands.

Assistant Director of the Career Development Centre, Vimi Devi Emraz set the tone of the evening with a brief overview of routes to employment and the importance of fit, which was a common theme across the evening’s full agenda.

Our Director of Strategy, Paul Mullins, who is considered an expert within the field and built the Investigo Strategy team into one of the most successful business units within the company, presented for 30 minutes on the ‘Current Landscape of Consulting’ and ‘Life After Consulting.’

Paul outlined in detail how the consultancy landscape has changed over the last five years, and is set to continue changing over the next five. With a common direction amongst many of the consulting firms towards a more central ground, it prompted the MBA graduates to really think about how this would affect their career choices in the coming months and years.

The acquisition of many of the smaller boutiques and established houses by the larger global consultancies is a trend that is set to continue. Assessing why Partners had moved, internal market saturation as well as regulators of Audit and Tax were

both cited as reasons, in addition to rigid pricing structures and the temptation of bigger roles available elsewhere.

There has been a very common trend realised amongst experienced consultants, the rise of the independent. Life after consulting can take a number of different directions; the corporate world, working with in-house strategy teams or within operating teams for Private Equity firms, an area that Paul specialises in. However, positives for both the consulting buyers of getting a fast and cost-effective approach from hiring an ex-consultancy member as well as the obvious benefit for the independent of improved work/life balance and the financial upside, means independent consultancy is fast becoming the choice for many.

The session clearly left the attendees with a wealth of information for them to digest on what their future as a consultant may look like, with the feedback forms citing the outlook from an industry specialist on trends and real-life examples being the pinnacle of a very successful agenda.

Paul’s insight was completed by a Q&A session, followed by a panel discussion with MBA graduates with experience of the recruiting process in the consulting world.

Click here to view the top tips on recruiting from this session and here to see photos from the day.