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(female audience member) I'm curious how often
you hire PhDs out of graduate school
and I'm also curious whether you think
there are special areas for improvement
they bring with them as well as unique strengths.
Because, I mean, I think they're a little different
from undergraduates.
They're older first of all.
But, I'm curious.
(Mohammed Aaser) I could maybe address that question a little bit.
I've had the opportunity to work with many graduate students;
some of my favorite at the firm to work with,
some of the most intelligent people
I've worked with too.
And Dave mentioned one thing that is sort of challenging
for them, and one thing, often I think graduate students
are involved in conducting their own sort of research
and working independently.
So they will have an advisor they work
closely with but will often be working by themselves
and it's very entrepreneurial in that sense.
But the only challenge is that when you sort of get
into a team based environment it becomes
a little bit tougher because now you have people
on a real-time basis who may be challenging the type
of work you do or may just be suggesting minor modifications.
And you're so used to owning the type of work you do.
So often the challenge is to just be openly accepting
of working with the team and getting feedback.
Usually it's not much of a challenge.
I know at McKenzie when we hire many graduate students
and we put them through a sort of bootcamp.
[laughter]
No, no, I'm just kidding.
Not a bootcamp.
But we put them through Mini-MBA is what we call it.
They all go to Austria for 2 weeks where
all the associates from around the world are joining
from graduate programs and they sit down
and they work with distinguished academics
in the business field.
And they go over all the business concepts
that might be important in consulting.
They also go over all the team based skills that they
may have challenges with, or any sort of
communication things they may find challenging.
And what we're trying to do is prepare them because
we know they're academics, some of the best and the brightest.
So in that respect that's the challenge we see
and often we try to provide the resources so they're
very sensical, in that way.
(Joe Volker) In my firm, it depends on the experience you have
while you're completing your degree.
For example, we have people who we have hired
who have not finished their doctorate but
they have organizational experience
that they're bringing to us.
We do sometimes hire interns.
The ones that have been successful in the last 10 years
have had experience before they went back
to graduate school to finish their degree and they
ended up finishing the degree while
they were employed by us.
So it would be rare, in my field, psychology,
because that's sort of the root discipline of leadership,
if somebody was a graduate student,
came right out of their undergraduate,
even though they were the best doctoral student
that the University produced, they just wouldn't have
the experience that we would need them to have.
They might have incredible potential but we probably need
people who have been in organizations or have
some other experiences that they can use to
build their credibility as consultants.
[audience question - inaudible]
(Darren Kaltved) So I believe the question was
in regards to recruiting for market research?
Specifically?
[audience member - inaudible]
(Darren) Okay.
(audience member)
So what role does research play in the consulting ranks
if you will,
working with clients, so on and so forth?
(Joe Volker) Well, our firm is considered a medium
to small firm in our market, 35 people.
And so we're not large enough to have a person
who's devoted to that role.
The expectation is that people who manage
client relationships would do the kind of market intelligence
that would impact their client organizations.
However, having said that, we're just hiring
some people who have some specialized expertise
to support the business, not necessarily to go
do more business.
So I think maybe that depends on the size
of the firm and how it's structured.
That'd be my response.
Any additions?
(Brian Spigursky) Um, WipFli is a smaller firm as well
and in terms of market research
we don't have a strong focus on it.
We did recently hire two analysts to come
and help with that specific task.
So I don't know how much of a focus we'd have
going forward on it, but for the short term we're
putting some more emphasis on that sort of skill.
(Mohammed Aaser) In the market research respect and consumer perspective,
at the firm we do have sort of a research arm
that just focuses in on conducting consumer surveys
or industry journals and stuff like that
to be invested but there's also a lot of other organizations
that specialize in doing market research
like Forester and there's a whole slew of them
which you may find interesting if you're
very interested in doing research
and publishing reports
it may make more sense to become a research analyst.
I think the skills however of conducting research,
I think are probably beneficial when being
a consultant because it's valuable to be
hypothesis driven and to know - here's what I'm looking for,
here's sort of the questions I want to address.
Whether or not you go on conducting research
or someone else conducts it for you it's good to know
that you've got the right set of questions to answer.
(Darren Kaltved) Very well.
Yes?
(female audience member) For your entry level positions
what is the problem they have with...(inaudible)?
(Charlie Anderson) I can answer this one easily. [laughter]
The problem most people have when they start
consulting -- that's a really good question,
and one that we've actually built into our sort of
bootcamp after the first go-around because it was
prevalent across all of our clients and that is that,
for better or worse, clients aren't prepared
for what talented people right out of school
can actually provide them.
And are going to spoon-feed you work.
Now, depends on the type of team you're on.
If you're on a 20 person team and it's all people
from your same consulting company and your leader
is someone who's from your company with 5 more years
of experience and they leader is the manager
of their company or something, that's different.
But if you're at a client site,
in my case typically we're on teams of 10 or fewer,
probably half of which would be Genesis 10 consultants,
and the other half would probably be clients
that provide the subject matter expertise.
Often times the work you're provided is spoon-fed to you.
You're not given the entire forest for the trees.
Someone's not going to sit down and take the time
it takes to really give you the full picture so that
you're completely enabled to find something to do
all day, every day, on your own.
Which isn't to say you'd be left on your own the whole time.
But most people think they can sit down with you
for an hour, tell you everything about
the project you're on, and the department,
and the organizational structure,
and all the tools you need, and all the places to go,
and all the different websites to check out
and you'll be fine.
But you won't necessarily.
So they'll give you one little task and it might
just be copying one column into another and adding
a formula and tabulating some data right?
And they think it's going to take you all week
and you'll do it in 2 hours and be done
because that might be how long it takes them to do it.
[laughter]
Because keep in mind, most people,
even myself, I graduated from college
more than 10 years ago, like, I didn't do any
team based projects.
I can't maybe speak for everyone
but team based learning is new.
I had never used PowerPoint or Excel or anything in school.
Most of the people you're working with will have
the same experience.
So you're already up to speed on these things
and you will deal with a lot of ambiguity
like I mentioned earlier.
You will finish your work faster than
they expect you to.
You will kind of be trying to find a way to tow that
line of talking to your manager for more to do,
and this isn't necessarily just true for consultants,
it's true across the board, versus bothering them
all the time because you don't have enough to do.
And what do you do with all that?
And depending on where you're going and
how they've enabled you and your success,
it may take you a few months to get to a point
where you can go in everyday and have your
own list that you created yourself of things you need
to get done and where you can provide value.
Or it might be day 2.
But in most cases you're going to deal with a lot of
ambiguity in trying to figure out exactly where
you fit in and how to provide value and
with the right structure and right support system,
and this has been basically my focus for the last year,
building this in for the 50 people who work for me,
it's probably the biggest problem they've had to face.
In fact it is.
(male audience member) So how do they solve it?
[laughing]