My Experience at the Profession of Management Consulting Panel
On Thursday, November 16th, the Telfer Career Centre, along with the Profession of Management Consulting Program (PMCP) hosted an event which included a panel of professionals in the management consulting industry, as well as networking.
Who Was There
The panel consisted of 4 professionals; Joel Marchildon – partner at Accenture, Shannon Kot – senior manager at Deloitte, Jaiman Chin – manager at KPMG, and Laura Spriggs – senior manager at Interis | BDO. These four industry professionals were accompanied by multiple employees from their firms who participated in the networking portion of the event.
What I Learned
The panelists were asked a variety of questions regarding their experiences as management consultants, and from this, three key topics were emphasized by all panelists:
1. Constant learning: being a professional management consultant requires workers to take on cases that they may not be experienced in. Working with many different clients on many different cases gives consultants new experiences every day, and requires them to be constantly learning and adapting.
2. Time commitment: all panelists agreed that in their profession, time commitment can be an issue. They explained that there is always another way to help out or get involved in a case, and even though it is always good to be taking on responsibility, you have to say no sometimes.
3. Team work: the panelists also emphasized that being a management consultant means consistently working as a team. All coworkers bring different expertise and experience and each client has different requirements. The workload cannot be taken on by one person and therefore the team is one of the firm’s greatest assets.
The networking portion of the event was also a wonderful learning experience. There was not as many people in attendance as an event such as Telfer Connects, making it much easier for me to network with professionals. Both the students and professionals were open to conversation which made this a very positive networking experience for me.
This was a fantastic event, and I would encourage all Telfer students to attend next year.
