Management consultancy is a discipline that produces results. Companies use management consultants to help them run their businesses more effectively. As a Management Consultant you are required to provide a specific skill set that that the client doesn’t have in-house. Most Management Consultants will have worked in the industry that they now consult within, but some skill sets are transferable and don’t necessarily have or require specific industry knowledge.
Shaping change
As a discipline, management consultancy helps clients shape and implement change within their organisation. Management Consultants can help clients transform the way their company operates by, for example:
§ Exploring sources of shareholder value creation
§ Identifying and creatively solving complex problems
§ Designing or re-engineering critical processes
A typical management consultancy project would involve performing a detailed diagnostic analysis with the client team to identify the root cause of the problem, then designing the processes and implementing the necessary organisational and technological changes.
Healthcare consulting
The healthcare industry is made up of a variety of different types of organisations, each seeking to innovate in order to succeed within an increasingly restrictive and competitive environment.
As a healthcare Consultant you could find yourself working on any of the following consultancy projects:
Healthcare providers
§ Public – working with Primary Care Trust (PCT) networks to improve patient treatment through nationwide access to patient records with the safe transfer of patient data
§ Private – supporting US-based private healthcare companies develop strategies for expansion into Europe
Payers
§ Pricing strategy – analysing pharma-economic data for the NHS to ensure that the benefit of a new therapy is taken into account when defining the price of the treatment
Pharmaceutical companies
§ R&D – identifying initiatives to increase the efficiency of clinical trials to reduce the time to launch drugs in the marketplace
§ Sales and marketing – supporting your client in an increasingly restrictive marketplace to develop a strategy for gaining the optimal price and market access in key target markets
Biotech companies
§ R&D – designing a plan to develop and commercialise drugs using a global network of providers and avoiding the need to build scale, as is the case in the traditional pharmaceutical model
§ Sales and marketing – helping your client identify potential buyers for partially or fully developed assets
Getting started
Management consultancy in the healthcare industry is very common. Many of the big management consultancies such as Accenture and Deloitte have a huge global presence and provide thousands of jobs every year to graduates and industry-specific consultants, often recruiting directly from the universities. If you are a graduate with a good degree (at least a 2:1 is usually required) and are inquisitive and want to learn how vertical markets work, you are likely to find something that suits your skill set and interests within a management consultancy. Positions within consultancies most often lead to jobs with large companies at a senior level, so consultancies are seen as great career start-points for graduates who aren’t sure which type of job to pursue.
