As a consultant, companies will look to you for answers: you need to recognize opportunities and hazards that others have missed, and convince company leaders that your solutions are the right ones. In the Consulting Academy, you’ll learn about the wide variety of opportunities available to prospective consultants. You’ll take part in company visits and networking opportunities with Kelley alumni at top consulting firms, and you’ll prove yourself through real-world consulting projects.
Consulting Academy: Gain hands-on experience, connect with leading firms
Description of the video:
What we really pride ourselves on at the Consulting Academy, is making our students client-ready day one. We'll emphasize the skills of strategic thinking, problem solving, as well as case analysis and case interviewing, which are critical to be successful in this profession.
Consulting Academy helped me to get an internship by giving a good framework for how to think about things and approach a problem. That, I think more than anything, is why I got my offer.
I came in not knowing anything about case interviews, not knowing anything about that process, and so the Academy was really helpful in preparing that. It gave me the essential skills I needed to succeed in the interview process.
We are placing far more students into profession upon graduation, which gives incoming students immediate access to a network of peers.
Networking in the Consulting Academy was really good, because when you normally have these companies everybody wants to talk to, and you have potentially 186 people in your class that are trying to talk to these companies, so to have that on a smaller scale of about 30 to 50 people instead, was incredible to actually make those connections on a really individual level with the companies.
The primary vehicle that we use to build skills and knowledge in the Consulting Academy is our live client engagements.
One of the things that was most helpful for me was actually being on a consulting project with a local organization. I really learned how to navigate the whole client-consultant type relationship, and really being able to best understand what the problem is our client was dealing with, even if they couldn't express it themselves. And having that experience, I was actually ... It was really helpful for me when I got to my internship, I had dealt with something very similar.
Deloitte comes and does a case competition. It's an intense day. We have a team of about five people, and you work overnight, and you present the next morning. On the job for consulting, you do that. And so having case competitions, and having cases that we work on like that, is very, very transferrable into the real world in consulting.
Academy Director and Career Coach
J. Scott Laughner recently joined Kelley as a faculty member and director of the Consulting Academy. He brings over 30 years of consulting experience as a senior managing director at Accenture, where he was based in their Chicago, Atlanta, London, San Francisco, and Indianapolis offices. Scott worked on engagements with Global 2000 companies early in his career and spent the second half of his career leading some of Accenture’s business segments. His client delivery and internal leadership positions give him a unique blend of expertise across strategy, operations, consulting, and systems integration. Prior to working at Accenture, he received his BA in industrial engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.
Suzanne Stuebe has over 20 years’ experience working with Fortune 100 companies as a consultant focused on improving operations and customer experience.
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