Strategy consultants are experts in helping companies remain competitive by analyzing business practices and designing improvement strategies. They provide impartial advice on high-level decisions, using their deep industry knowledge to deliver the best results. It is a type of Management Consulting, which generally involves advising at the highest level of a company. Strategic consulting is a niche that provides strategic advice and guidance to organizations on how best to achieve a goal.
It involves researching the topic in question, identifying present and future opportunities and challenges, and then making recommendations. The functional strategy involves the development of strategic plans and roadmaps for organizational functions, such as sales, marketing, finance, human resources, supply chain, R&D or procurement. Job titles vary between consulting firms, but consultants can go through several levels of employment, from beginners to experienced. In the future, the lines between strategy, operations and technology are expected to blur even more, with an increasing number of consultancies willing to play a role in this field.
In the case of human resources, consultants can contribute to human capital strategies, including talent management business cases. For example, a strategy consultant with experience in digital transformation could help a publication decide how to take advantage of their web traffic and adapt to reader behavior. Corporate strategy, also known as strategic management, involves the formulation of strategies and objectives for the entire company and business units. And if you're a visual student, here's a video with a hypothetical example that shows how strategy consultants, such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, approach projects.
It's important for a strategy consultant to stay abreast of the latest trends, data, products, services, customers, competitors, markets, regulations and changes in the industry. Companies dedicated to strategic consulting are divided between those that do nothing more than strategic consulting (pure practice) and those that offer it together with other professional and consulting services. To become a strategy consultant you need to get a few years of specialized work experience in a consulting-related field and then make the switch. Strategy consultants with an MBA join consulting firms at this level and can manage their own teams and functional areas, in addition to analyzing information and developing project results. After the years of crisis, global growth was slow due to the recovery of the US and European markets which together represent a large majority of the global consulting industry. Faced with such uncertainty, strategy consultancies provide research-based advice backed by data on the right step to take.
