Currently coming to the end of my masters, and there seems to be a lot of jobs out there! Im trying to determine what i want to do, and i feel its either going to be consultancy, or private equity.My question is, if i go to one, will it stop me from transferring? I was thinking of doing a couple years in a Financial services consultancy, (ive heard good things about PA and capital markets?) and then after some experience, maybe then make a switch (if i feel that way inclined).......or would this career path be a waste of time?(im not too concerned about starting salaries, as i know once you put the effort in any field, you will reap the rewards...)

"im not too concerned about starting salaries, as i know once you put the effort in any field, you will reap the rewards..."This is not true. e.g. toilet cleaning, fast food restaurants, consulting

Couple of reality checks - PE is extremely hard to get into, both because (comparatively) the sector is still small, and the PE houses highly elitist - even more so than MBB if you can imagine that. Usually will only look at top few % of MBBB consultants for a shift into PE, and without direct banking experience this is even lower. Also, alot of people who enter PE leave again after the frustration of failed auctions mounts up - its one thing to get the substabtial carried interest when it works, but for the most part PE firms dont win. Hedge Funds are more robust, carry less frustration, and - allowing for some fluctuations in the market - have less attrition, are increasingly operating like PE, and pay just as well.Window cleaning at the Eden Project is also a challenging and - I suspect - well paid option...

Are there any consultancies which have specific private equity service offerings in the post deal business transformation space?

Well i didnt want to say im motivated by salary (even though im not accepting peanuts!), as most of the threads in here are.. how much do you get at company a, b or c....Hedge funds... i only know broadly what this is, and as good as google is, im still a little stumped, in the sense... what can the consultant bring to the table for hedge funds? i assumed they would all be traders/ib's........

post deal work would be simply the peformance imprpvement work, scm work or whatever that is required to bring the invested company upto a level whereby it can be divested at profit to the fund. It dosent require a specific consulting firm, and it isnt a service line per se.As regards what a consultant can bring to Hedge Funds, its much the same as what a consultant can bring to PE (by which I assume we mean the real PE, the transactional stuff); an insight into how businesses operate, best practice etc. Its more about what is transferable, the analytics etc than it is about the consulting skills set. There is no more money to be made in PE as a consultant improving their invested companies than there is an ACME consultancy; the real opportunity is in the transaction lifecycle, specifically - for the more experienced, the golden goose is origination, rather than exec ution.