I don't know what I want to do.....

I dont want to bash Bain, because frankly, I don't know if it's true or not, so take my view with a grain of salt. That said, my gut tells me it's not entirely true. I read that and it sounds a LOT like other statements I've heard from other companies - though no one outright says 3 days a week onsite, regional only.

When I read:

"Consultants can expect to travel. However, Bain's business model is more conducive to one to three days a week instead of four or five days. We can work from our home offices and visit the client only when necessary. In addition, we are staffed on our local office partners' cases. As a result, our travel is typically regional, which means shorter trips."

I see:

"Our consultants travel a lot. However, at Bain we try to keep it to three days a week unless work demands more or the client expresses a preference otherwise or the partner deems it necessary because of some presentation they have. When that doesn't happen, we work from our offices, and of course we try to keep our staffing regional, which doesn't mean you wont be flying, it just means we'll try to keep your flight time within 4 hours in any direction. That is, unless there is a shortage of staff, a need for someone with your skillset, a specific request for you by a partner or client needs that otherwise demand additional travel."

It sounds to me like a firm that understands the difficult lifestyle of consulting, and tries to be accommodating but probably isn't as much as they suggest there. I can't think of a single client I've ever worked with that would accept a one-day a week onsite engagement. I mean, think about it, your paying a team of four upwards of $75,000 a week in burn and you are OK with them being onsite once or twice a week?

Now, that said, I will say that I've never seen a consulting company make a claim as bold as Bains of ONE to THREE - so I must admit, the sheer audacity of the claim piques my interest. I'll have to ask around and see if its true, but for now, I'd be lumping this right next to Morgan Stanleys "flexible work from home schedule".

With consulting, isn't there ever stuff to do at the home office? Reporting on projects, meeting with other home staff, etc?

In my current job, when i do consulting it's a fun perk -- a reward for being good enough to get farmed out. (For a nonprofit, we manage our brand VERY carefully. If the big guys with the deep pockets don't think we're absolutely stellar, it's bad for PR, bad for funding, and therefore bad for the bottom line. I am one of the few on staff who get to do this. Mostly it's the CEO.) It's a shift from the usual work and fun to have the people I'm helping think I'm a genius.

But I imagine how quickly that effect would wear off if it's what I did every day every day every day.

Here's an article from Barron's about the (current) golden goose of investment management - hedge funds. They keep talking about a specific investment style, so those heading to Chicago (Friedman economics), Columbia (Value) and Wharton (high yield I guess) study hard.

"The B-School Brigade's A-List

By SUZANNE MCGEE


DUGGAN JENSEN, A 27-YEAR-OLD Harvard Business School student, has no question about what field he'll pursue after graduating this spring: hedge funds. He is drawn by the excitement, the potential for huge financial rewards and the absence of big bureaucracies with long career ladders. "Nobody getting their Harvard MBA wants to have to struggle with not having enough responsibility out of the gate," says Jensen.

His classmates seem to agree. When one modest-sized hedge fund, Durban Capital, recently offered to speak with Harvard B-schoolers about job opportunities, it drew an overflow crowd to a lecture hall designed for 90. "I was utterly stunned," says David Berman, the fund's founder. Berman, who had expected to chat informally with a handful of students, found himself giving an ad-hoc presentation for an hour. And, he says, "not one person left the room."

Yes, hedge funds are getting plenty of attention from the class of 2007 -- not just at Harvard but at other top business schools, too. At the same time, the funds, which long have hired mainly from Wall Street trading desks, are showing an increased appetite for newly minted MBAs. The industry's still-rapid growth -- assets rose 15% last year, to $1.4 trillion, says a leading industry researcher, Hennessee Group -- demands constant hiring. And some sharp, young minds from B-schools, the funds hope, could be just the ticket for devising the next generation of quantitative models and finding the right path to the hallowed ground of alpha.



There are some catches, however. If hedge funds fail to identify the most creative students, they may only exacerbate what is arguably the industry's biggest problem: similarly trained people pursuing similar strategies at exactly the same time. Likewise, students at the top schools aren't looking to join just any hedge fund. Jensen, for instance, has his sights set firmly on his home state of California, not the hedge-fund meccas of New York and London. Others want a hedge fund with a particular track record or a certain strategy, like investing in distressed companies.

As a result, both the industry and the students are proceeding with a measure of caution, like disciplined traders waiting for perfect opportunities. But the two sides' interest in each other is unmistakable and rising. At Columbia Business School, for instance, some 11% of 2006 graduates went into investment management, nearly double the share from 2004; assistant dean Regina Resnick traces much of the jump to hedge funds.

Hedge funds, for their part, are starting to recruit at the schools, just as Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Proctor & Gamble long have done. "There are far more jobs being posted and firms coming to campus this year than there were even last year," says Jensen. Almost every day, he adds, he and his fellow members of an investment club at Harvard receive at least one e-mail from a hedge fund seeking resumes.

The industry has little choice but to turn to the business schools. Fund managers used to reach out to their friends and contacts, spreading the word that they were looking to hire an extra person, and, without ever having to post an ad, the position could be filled. But that's getting much harder to do.

"There was a time, not all that long ago, when a proprietary trader at a bank might not have been paid so well and you could say, 'let's get him on board,'" recalls Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, an associate professor of business at Columbia Business School. "Nowadays, not only is the bank paying that guy more, but if he's good, he may decide to start a hedge fund himself, or he's got a dozen other hedge funds all bidding for him as well."

The funds have been experimenting with different ways to find the right B-schoolers. Sometimes, no specific job is mentioned, a break from the practices of the traditional companies recruiting on campus. A hedge fund may have only one or two positions available at any time, and says an executive at one large New York-based fund, "we'd rather keep that position open for months and months than hire the wrong person."

While some big funds assure potential recruits that no experience is required and that job training will be provided, for the most part, hedge funds are looking for students with some financial expertise and knowledge of a particular industry or investing style. To identify those, they are making greater use of schools' formal recruiting channels.

"Certainly, we find more and more hedge funds are connecting with us, rather than just reaching out to individual students who they'd identify through their network," says Sara Simons, senior associate director of MBA Career Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "They are just starting to think about how they will evaluate a broader range of potential candidates for these jobs."


MBA candidate Duggan Jensen of Harvard has his sights on a fund job in California.

Simons believes that this shift in ecruiting strategy will prove healthy for the hedge-fund industry over the long haul, resulting in an influx of new kinds of recruits able to ferret out new kinds of investment strategies and increase the funds' returns. But in the shorter term -- despite the excitement among students, and despite the need of hedge-fund managers to expand their teams -- the process is bumpy and puts new demands on all the participants, including the business schools themselves.

At Harvard, for instance, Tim Butler, the director of career-development programs, last year recruited a new "career coach" from the ranks of alumni, so that students eager to join the hedge-fund industry can benefit from first-hand knowledge of how it works. The coach is Newton, Mass.-based Joan Ronayne, who oversees her own pool of capital, managed according to a long/short equity strategy. She says the most common question she fields might at first blush seem very basic: What is a hedge fund? "It's an evolving definition," Ronayne says, "and there is so much variety, that the first thing people are interested in is getting their arms around the concept a little better."

Meanwhile, Jana Kierstead, Harvard's director of MBA career services, is ramping up the office's range of contacts with the hedge-fund industry. "The contacts we get from people tend to be slightly ambiguous, along the lines of, 'We're thinking of hiring someone.'" Complicating her life -- not to mention the students' job searches -- many hedge funds are reluctant to formalize the recruiting process too much. "They want to see an effort on the part of the students; they want the student to take the initiative and seek them out."

So, on a frosty Monday morning early this month, the first day of a big recruiting week for first-year MBA students, relatively few hedge-fund managers showed up to sign in at tables at Spangler Hall and interview the swarms of impeccably dressed and eager-eyed students who thronged the halls with resumés in leather portfolios tucked under their arms. It's a ritual called Hell Week, and so far, it seems, hedge funds are largely sitting it out.

"Most of the hedge funds seem to have jobs -- far more than I saw a year ago -- but it's ad hoc recruiting," says Alvis Matlija, who is taking refuge from the furor in Spangler's downstairs cafeteria, the Grille. Matlija spent the first half of last summer working for a private-equity fund, and the second half at a hedge fund, working on an event-driven investment team. (The hedge-fund job didn't become available until mid-June, he notes.)

When Matlija, an Albanian, arrived at Harvard Business School 18 months ago, the nuances of hedge funds, private equity funds and other kinds of investment vehicles were still blurry to him. "After high school, I worked in the non-profit sector in Kosovo and in my country," before attending college in Greece, Matlija explains. But he finds the financial world fascinating, and now has his sights firmly on hedge funds. "I want to work within a smaller, more interesting organization," he says. "But the process is very unstructured; your net has to be really wide to catch the right kind of fish."

Not that it's any consolation to Matlija, but the hiring process is no easier for higher-level positions at hedge funds. The recruiters increasingly brought in to help with these searches can find it tricky to meet many funds' highly specific needs

"They may want someone with knowledge of a particular specialized strategy, who can lead the fund's move into that investment area," says Cathryn Palmieri, managing director at recruiting giant Korn/Ferry. "They all want new blood -- people capable of taking up the quest for alpha so they can stay on top of the heap -- but they have very, very specific ideas of what that new blood looks like."

With 9,800 funds operating and an average of three launched each working day, according to Hennessee's data, more is on the line with each new recruit.

"The guys who will be successful as the business becomes more institutionalized are those who will figure out the right way to build a diverse team of younger people who can move into more new asset classes and continue to generate profits," says Charles Gradante, co-founder and managing principal of Hennessee.

Any number of traits in a candidate could catch a particular fund's fancy. "If you weren't necessarily the best quantitative model-builder on the planet, but every so often you came up with a new way of looking at a market or a company that caused the portfolio manager to say 'wow, I hadn't thought of that,' then you're adding alpha, and that's going to be invaluable," says Columbia's Rhodes-Kropf. "The smartest people in this industry know that they need to hire more creatively."

The need is underscored by the experience of Berman's Durban Capital, a noted player in the stocks of retail companies. A decade ago, for instance, Berman hired a weather consultant to advise him on weather-related consumer trends. "The guy told me a big snowstorm was going to hit the Northeast, and it became a license to print money for me," he says. But now, with more smart people in the hedge-fund world looking for an edge, playing weather trends no longer works. Berman figures that few factors that might affect consumer demand are being overlooked making it that much harder for any individual fund to score a big coup.

Berman, who can point to 12 years of consistent profits, has still seen average gross returns shrink from nearly 40% to half that level or less. "Part of that," he says, "is certainly due to the fact you simply have more and more and more people, all being pulled into this business by the money that they believe is available."

Berman right now is thinking long and hard about how to fill one particular position: summer intern. That title may sound humdrum; however, Berman's requirements are anything but. "I'm looking for someone who is passionate about more than just making money, and who really knows what a hedge fund is about," he says. "I want someone who is dedicated to being a great investor."

Class, start taking notes."

This departs slightly from the current direction of the dicsussion - but what did everyone who applied for 07 matric write for short term career essays? Very interesting that most seem not to know!

No, usually not. The primary reason is that consulting tends to be a face-time focused industry. You stay as long as the client works, and then you stay as long your manager stays, who will stay as long as the principal stays who wont leave before the partner, who wont leave until he feels like it cause he's probably just reading the paper anyway. Either way, your partner wants to know that if the client asks for something, his team is ready and there to knock it out in lightning record time.

I'm not saying what you do couldn't be done remotely - I dont think I've ever had a job where I couldn't do it remotely - its just that clients dont like that. There's pressure from them not to be remote, and their is usually pressure from partners as well. They have a point of course - most of the time you need the client's help in getting things done. That means being onsite and scheduling meetings, not impersonal conference calls. Clients are also not always all that helpful or willing to spend time with consultants - sometimes theres some hostility there - and you need to be onsite to track down employees who arent getting you what you need. Emails and phone calls are too easy to ignore. A person standing in your cubicle is much harder to brush off.

As for reporting on a project - if you have to report on status and you need input from people - which you no doubt do - you again come back to the "running people down" aspect which can do onsite, but you cant off.

As for meeting with other home staff, there's no reason you should be doing that on company time anyway, and it'd likely be frowned upon. Just because you aren't on a company site doesn't mean they don't expect you to be working. Usually people try to meet for lunch and the like, but there isn't, at least in my experience, a big push for "home office networking time".

Too old for IB? And what might that age be my friend?

Freakin' awesome post, guys...this is the stuff you love to read as an MBA student. I hear so many work categories and functions and titles, but don't hear often enough about what exactly they entail. So these first-hand (or 2nd hand) accounts are great.

My goal has and always will be to own (not start, but eventually buy and manage) a company in the heavy construction industry.

To get there, I will probably focus on a general management position in that industry or similar.

However, as someone mentioned, GM jobs don't often go right away to fresh MBAs. I would imagine you would have to be expert in one particular area before moving to GM ??

For that reason, I'm really trying to nail down what that first post-MBA position will be, since it will set me up for the GM job and consequently set me up to own/buy the construction biz.

jatt -- 33. I'm guessing I'm too old for IB. Think not?

Potentially 3-4 hours less per day? If this is true, I may reconsider IB on the West Coast.

Whats the pay/hr with 100 hr weeks? Is it worth it?

I am married and have a young child, so I won't be looking for something as hectic.

Java,

I could be wrong, but the amount of hours you work per week make little or no difference to how much you make as a consultant. Consulting firms pay a salary to you, not hourly wages, and few pay overtime.

However, you could work well over 40 billable hours per week, allowing your firm to charge the client for much more than 40 hours per week, while still paying you your standard salary. They are very interested in getting as much as they can out of you while you're on site.

I believe the rates for beginning Analysts at a company like Accenture, for example, are around $125 per hour - obviously much more than the Analysts themselves make (~$55k to start). For consultants with MBAs - the rate may be closer to $200 per hour and the salary closer to $100k.


Artis

So what job pulls in the most money after IB/MC (not counting the impossible PE/IM/HF etc)?

I assume outside of the jobs listed above, the hours are more sane (60s range)

Thanks Artis... looks like it is just like my life as a Java Consultant!
I graduate in 2009, I guess I will figure it out by then..

I hear you buddy. I am a year or so younger than you are and am thinking myself that I am too old for IB. Congrats on your admit to INSEAD. I am contemplating to apply there for the Jan 08 intake. What potential industries will you be targetting post-MBA, if I may ask?

jatt,

I'm not sure ..yet. I know what I don't want to do -- but I don't yet know what I want to do :) I would perhaps move to Industry or, if there is an appropriate rationalization based on my experience, I might try management consulting as well. I have no desire to even try for IB - the job profile does not interest me and also don't think I'm qualified (for various reasons) for that job. Works (or doesn't work) both ways.

What about you?

Sent you a pm.

Any one here who has an environmental background and contemplating an MBA? Would love to hear their exit options post-MBA.