Dodger - with less than 2 years' experience a firm would consider you to have no sector experience of note (certainly not enough sector experience to be of value to clients), so at this stage in your career you would be someone to be considered for the firms' graduate entry schemes or not at all. In the years after joining as a graduate entry candidate you would be considered a generalist and would be staffed on projects across a wide variety of sectors, so not a sector specialist in any way.From 2-8 years' experience you could be hired as an experienced hire, where essentially the firms are looking to bring in someone who would be more of a sector specialist and be of interest to clients for their sector expertise. Ordinarily I would say that you need several years of experience in a sector to be hired as an experienced hire, otherwise you simply don't have the expertise to be credibly put before a client as any kind of expert. Usually the period between graduation and having 4-5 years' professional experience is therefore considered a bit of a graveyard zone in terms of successfully moving into consulting; you're too experienced to be taken onto the graduate entry schemes but not yet experienced enough to be a credible experienced hire.The caveat to this - and why you've seen reference to 2+ years' experience - is that during downturns consulting firms do severely reign back on their graduate hiring volumes. The repercussions of this are that in the subsequent years when the economy recovers, firms face the organisational challenge that they are "top heavy" and don't have enough juniors coming up through the ranks to meet client demand. So there are windows of opportunity - and now would be one such time - when firms will hire less experienced "experienced hires" but are essentially looking to hire people who will come into the firms as generalists (and so work alongside the graduates who were hired fresh from university in the last couple of years). They are essentially looking to hire the candidates that they would have hired from university a couple of years ago, had their graduate recruiting volumes not been scaled back at that time.The upshot of this is that if you're hired as an "experienced hire" with only 2-3 years' experience then you'll primarily be being hired to be a generalist consultant - and the firms will be looking for strong academics and a prestigious / fast-track employment record to date, but with the exact sector in which that experience has been accumulated being of only minor importance.By contrast if you're hired as an experienced hire with 4-5 years or more of experience then you'll be being hired as a sector specialist - and so your ability to make such a move will be much more a function of whether your specialist practice area is doing well or not in the current climate and the degree to which they're finding it difficult to make experienced hires in that sector. For example if you were a financial services experienced hire right now your chances of making such a move would be pretty good; if you were a public sector professional then your odds would be poor. But 2-3 years ago the reverse of this would have been true. So there is an element of luck here as to whether you can make the move later in your career; so if you saw an opportunity to get into consulting with only 2 years of experience then I would definitely take it.Hope this helps - there's a chapter on this in the Definitive Guide if you haven't already reviewed it.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com
