Each year, hundreds of HBS students walk across the Commencement stage anticipating a near-term career in management consulting. In addition, many more also prepare to enter other careers where their roles will be more advisory than operational. Often with only limited work experience as analysts at best, or, in most cases, no background whatsoever, these students face a daunting challenge, as they will have to rely on introductory firm training and apprenticeship learning to transition to a role as a skilled advisor to executives. This course thus aims to address a critical need within the HBS curriculum by offering students a comprehensive and integrated approach for attaining success in their post-MBA role as advisors and counselors.

Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills (MCAS) seeks to develop critical consulting skills among two core groups within the EC: on the one hand are aspiring-consultants who need to build competency to immediately add meaningful value to their teams, client organizations, and firms; and on the other hand are non-consultants who are looking to wield the same set of tools, skills, and frameworks to add meaningful value to their organizations. In addition, this course may also be useful to those who will work with consultants in the future, as it will offer key insight into the “consultant’s way of working.”

This course was developed as part of an independent project by three HBS students in partnership with Senior Lecturer David Fubini. Professor Fubini spent 34 years at McKinsey & Company, ultimately establishing and heading the firm’s Boston office, as well as leading a number of critical organizational and strategic practices. With his guidance, the student group generated a list of topics they wanted to master and questions they yearned to answer, all in the service of doing high-quality work that was impactful and meaningful not only for their clients and firms, but also for themselves. This list became the structure for the course themes, topics, and cases. The course design also builds on the historically successful EC course Professional Firm Management, and leverages learning from the Leading Professional Services Firm Executive Education course. The outcome is a course curated by and for aspiring-consultant students and taught by a deeply experienced practitioner.

Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills seeks to help students gain a comprehensive knowledge of the tools, skills, frameworks, and mindsets required to be successful across all facets of their advisory/consultative roles. While many consulting firms’ initial training programs highlight the skills required to complete key tasks—performing analyses, building models, crafting presentations—they are, by necessity, short and introductory only. This course goes deeper. Grounded in the understanding that relationships are paramount to success as an advisor, this course covers how to manage teams, partners, clients, firm politics, and the consultant’s life and career. Understanding the complexities of the role, this course will present students with complex and difficult situations to develop strategies for dealing with industry-specific dilemmas. The course covers this material through a mix of cases, workshops, discussions, and an interactive assignment.

This course serves to provide students with an academic and pragmatic lens to consulting in order to create a comprehensive toolkit they can use in both consulting and industry roles. Importantly, it does so in a foundational way that will build on summer internships and other consulting experiences while still remaining accessible to interested newcomers. With this course, students can start their careers with a meaningful set of skills they can apply before formalized training even begins. Put simply, this course will help students master consulting and advisory skills.

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