A lot of the people who come to this website ask about starting salaries, or which company is the best, or which company they should join. For the sake of argument, I’m going to throw this into the mix:It simply doesn’t matter.Your first career is your stepping stone onto the corporate ladder. As my other post (Thread: 29151) will demonstrate very clearly, the first few years you spend working in any consultancy are likely to be pretty crap. You’ll spend a lot of time doing analysis in Excel and creating presentations in Powerpoint. You’ll spend time facilitating workshops, but generally only in the sticking-stuff-on-the-wall-with-Bluetac and capturing-stuff-on-a-flipchart sort of way.You’ll get some face time with the senior managers and partners in your firm, but generally the information flow will be one way. You’ll be learning a huge amount all the time from people who generally know what they’re doing. You might meet some interesting clients, but you’ll never be allowed to spend much time with them unsupervised, lest you say something stupid.When projects over-run, you’ll be called on to work until midnight, long after your more senior colleagues have gone home. No matter what you think now, £35K isn’t much money in London. So your standard of life for the first few years is not going to be a jet-setting one.What does all of this mean?It means a few things. First, you really should disregard salary as a factor in which job you decide to take. Your salary is likely to shoot up a lot after your first 2-3 years in consulting, when you’ve learned enough that you’re genuinely useful as an advisor (rather than someone who’s pretty clever but doesn’t understand a great deal about how big business works).Second, you should realise that any one of the big consultancies is a pretty good place to cut your teeth. When you take your second job (and you *should* by all means move after your first three years if you want to secure your promotion and a much bigger salary), your second employer will basically want to see that you’ve had a good training experience. Any medium- and large- sized consultancy will offer this. With a few notable exceptions (MBBB, who are very much first among equals), the other big consultancies have equal credibility on your CV.Third, being at the bottom of the consulting tree is pretty rubbish no matter where you are. We’ve all gone through it in our time, and yes, life does get better as you move up the tree. But a lot of the ‘quality of life’ questions that get asked here really don’t apply to graduate positions, because you’re more likely than your more senior colleagues to get stuck with the crappy jobs that erode quality of life.Moral of the story? Don’t get too hung up about which consultancy you choose, because they’re all about the same at graduate level. They’ll all provide you with the right foundations for building the rest of your consulting career. Follow your gut instinct, and go to the one you like best, not the one that’s done the best job of brainwashing the graduates with their recruitment materials and word-of-mouth hype.
