What is management consulting?
As the world of business expands and gets ever more complex and competitive, the management consulting industry has emerged. Experts in tackling business problems, with both analytical skills and creativity, management consultants are hired by companies to help diagnose and tackle business problems as they arise, using a variety of tools and frameworks, along with a healthy dose of industry understanding and intuition borne of experience.
What will we learn?
This course teaches students how to:
- Understand and use SMART goals to define and tackle problems.
- Learn how to approach problems & build solutions.
- Understand the differences between synthesis and summary.
- Identify the key tools used to plan analysis and sequence work.
Who will be teaching this class?
Byron Ascott-Evans worked for McKinsey for five years, doing projects in a variety of industries (namely Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Electric Power and Natural Gas, and Private Equity) and focusing primarily on strategy and organisational topics (e.g., culture transformation). His projects took him all over the globe, spanning Southern Africa, Central Europe, North America and Asia. Byron has been teaching for iXperience since 2019 and has built and taught every version of the Management Consulting course.
How does the online course work?
Students will join their US-based classmates in online classes, live-taught via Zoom. They will work with students from all over the world, ones that have travelled to US college campuses, and others dialling in from elsewhere. Learning and doing teamwork online teaches them incredibly valuable skills, such as effective communication, teamwork, and working with people in different time zones. All of these are especially valuable in our modern, often remote-first working world.
What is a micro-internship?
Each programme takes part in a group micro-internship project, in which they tackle a real-world business problem using the skills they have learned in their course. This is a great chance to get real-world work experience within the safety of a learning environment. This is the first year we are doing Management Consulting with Summer Springboard, however, previous Management Consulting students have done their micro-internships with Just A Change, a non-profit organisation dedicated to rebuilding homes for people in need in Portugal. Students evaluated the organisation’s proposed expansion into the United States, researching effective models, and laying the groundwork for an expansion strategy the organisation could use if they decided to go ahead with the expansion. Their experience gave them a great advantage in college applications and gave them a clear idea of what it could be like working in the field of management consulting.