Jobaaj Stories
- I am Shubham Agarwal, MBA Cambridge, and a consulting professional with 8+ years of experience in strategy consulting
- Currently, I am on a mission to share my experience and learning with the next generation of consultants and growth strategists.
- As a mentor, I have taught over 1500+ students and have personally trained more than a hundred students in building their own consulting careers
Believe it or not, but my journey with consulting started with a degree in engineering. In 2011, I was doing my Bachelor in Engineering from PES university.
Having worked some internships during my early years, and being a part of college-level startups, I launched my own first, full-scale venture in 2015. It was an on-campus startup called Project-ed. The idea was to provide college students with technical and informational resources to help bring their ideas to life.
Scaling a pan-India business during college
We assisted students who had a practical idea and wanted to bring it to a workable model. We would help them structure the idea, fine-tune it, and fund their technical requirements to bring the project to life.
We would then also assist them in patenting the idea. And only once the idea was monetizable would Project-ed take a portion of the income generated.
In less than 2 years, we were able to scale the idea of Project-ed to colleges all over India, including IITs, and NITs.
The best part about scaling Project-ed was that we had gotten an overwhelming response for it because students actively needed a platform that could help them bring their ideas to life.
Difficulties in funding their ideas and helping them reach the patent stage were also pain points for a lot of engineering students. And Project-ed helped with that.
Even after my engineering, I continued to work on Project-ed for some months.
However, Project-ed is not exactly a success story. It is in fact a failure story because although we were able to scale the venture exponentially, there was a fundamental flaw in the business.
The revenue lifecycle of Project-ed was extremely long. The journey of a raw idea into a profitable patent is long and often a lot of ideas didn’t pan out.
Consequently, the finances became difficult to handle. In the lack of a structured team and a solidified revenue model, I finally decided to shut down Project-ed.
Then, in 2017, I got ready for my first major job role in consulting.
Joining ZS as a consultant
At this point, you will be entitled to ask how I cracked a role in consulting with a degree in engineering.
Here, I’ll tell you an interesting thing about consulting jobs and their interviews.
It doesn’t matter from which stream or which degree you come from.
The only thing that really matters is that you must have a problem-solving mindset and a business-oriented thinking process.
Here’s where my experience with Project-ed came into play.
Having already worked in various internships and having scaled my own venture pan-India, I had developed a certain acumen for understanding business.
But even after all that, I still needed to study and research to sharpen my analytical acumen and become more business-literate.
All of that helped me in cracking the case interviews of ZS and come out on top.
And that’s the story of how an engineering student cracked a consulting role fresh out of college.
My decision to pursue an international MBA
Having worked in ZS as a consultant for a while, I began to realize that consulting is a role that requires you to be dynamic.
The role I was working on was dynamic as well. But I was beginning to feel that I lacked a certain multi-dimensionality!
It made me realize that I still needed more exposure. While I do believe that a consulting role is good for industry exposure but it’s also very industry-specific and you might end up working in a specific industry for far too long.
I could explain it to you with an example of Satya Nadella.
Although he is a genius and has an impeccable command over the business and his industry.
But he has been in the same industry for so long that he still needs to hire management consultants to opine him about possible ventures or collaboration opportunities in other domains.
With all this in mind, I knew that I needed more industry exposure. More importantly, I needed to meet more dynamic people and understand different perspectives of people and how they approach businesses.
That’s how my journey to Cambridge started.
Here’s what no one will tell you about Cambridge
I believe Cambridge to be the best experience I have ever had in my life. I started my MBA at the University of Cambridge in Sept 2021.
I continued my consulting career with ZS in parallel to my MBA in Cambridge. And while they were 2 of the most challenging years I had ever faced, I am glad that I took the Cambridge decision.
The first and the most fascinating thing you’ll notice about the University of Cambridge is its people.
Every single person you meet may be a potential scientist, researcher, company CXO, entrepreneur, or even a popular influencer.
I was sitting in my class and sitting right next to me was a neurobiologist who was actually working on a project that aimed to transform the way psychology is interpreted.
So the most important thing I took away from Cambridge, was perspective.
And that is literally all I needed. That’s what any consultant needs.
I talked to so many people from so many different spectrums of industry and walks of life. And I got to understand how they saw businesses, what their pain points were, and their thoughts on ethics and life in general.
The whole experience opened a wide range of consulting pathways for me and also gave me a whole different multi-dimensional range of thinking and strategizing.
Embracing the walk of a mentor
Consulting has always been a rather closed-off profession in the Indian scenario. But I have observed that very recently, people especially young students have begun to embrace the role of marketing and strategy in the growth of the business.
The funny thing about teaching consulting is that it’s not a technical skill. The idea behind my mentorship program on consulting is to train students to think multi-dimensionally and to be able to attack business problems from different angles.
Any consulting job role would require you to be able to solve case interviews. Because those case interviews are designed to test if the candidates have an in-depth knowledge about businesses!
And that’s what my entire program is structured upon. Apart from analyzing multiple case studies in live sessions and holding mock case discussion rounds, I also center the training experience toward dedicated career personalization.
Consulting is often industry-specific and beginners looking to get into consulting must always decide early on as to what industry should they step in with their consulting shoes!
So to help students make the decision, I give out different kinds of assignments and case studies to the students and then give them personalized one-to-one feedback on their assignment work based on which we discuss which consulting path should be better for them.
Till now, this strategy has worked for almost all the students who have enrolled yet and they have also got far better clarity on their consulting paths.
A day in my life as a Management Consultant
While consulting often seems like a pretty glorious career, it is often demanding.
During my time with ZS, my major area of expertise was the medical and pharma sector. And I worked with a lot of pharma clients.
Now the pharma sales scenario in the UK is pretty leveraged. The whole industry is highly dependent on its sales executives who pitch directly to medical professionals, for their sales revenue.
But during the covid pandemic, the industry saw a potentially lethal risk to their revenue sources.
Because of the covid pandemic, the sales reps couldn’t schedule direct meetings with their clients.
This could have meant a significant drop in their revenues. Now the sales reps COULD schedule online meetings, but that would still mean a drop in revenue. So this was a business problem that they needed assistance with.
Now as a consultant, my job was to assist them with a counter strategy. So I was supposed to reach down to the client’s headquarters, schedule meetings with their board members, and understand the problem.
After that, I was required to collect and analyze data, regarding the current sales, the predicted impact in case the meetings were scheduled on zoom, and predicted data in case any other strategies were implemented.
I was then responsible to come up with alternative strategies, suggesting why they should implement them, and presenting my case.
In hindsight, that sums up the role of a consultant. So if this is the kind of life you’d like to embrace, then you might be ready for a career in consulting.
Here’s to all the consulting aspirants out there
So if you are someone who is thinking of building a career in consulting, here are some things that I am obliged to tell you:
- If you are planning to dive deep into consulting, you NEED a personalized roadmap. Consulting is a vast field so you’ll need to figure out which industry you’d like to specialize in.
- One of the fastest ways to understand business is by going through detailed case studies of how businesses work. That’s also the reason, case interviews are a major screening factor for consulting job roles.
- Communication and presentation skills play a vast role in the domain so you need to make sure that you have fine-tuned them to your best.
In the end, I’d just say this. Unlike software development, taxation, or any other profession, a career in consulting calls for an active and strategic mindset 24/7.
Even on the go, you ought to always be strategizing, and get inspired by all the perspectives that you come across.
So if creative and analytical thinking is your forte, then consulting might just be your calling!
And if you have got any questions or doubts about your consulting career, then I am always ready to solve doubts for young future consultants. Feel free to hit me up with questions on my Linkedin.
Also, I hold FREE workshops every week on Saturday, where I guide students on how to get their first step in consulting. So feel free to give it a visit. Register here for the workshop!
Thanks for Reading!
