I think one of the most notable things is learning how to talk and to think in clear (and effective) ways, even if unfortunately sometimes it's employed in a way that comes off as low in content or expertise.
It's about understanding how to organize thoughts and present a point in a way that an executive would want to make a decision on a topic. (When it goes the way it should.)
After a stint in consulting, you sometimes have meetings with people you work with up and down the chain in a company, and you wonder, "my god, how do you get through every day with the disorganized jumble of random thoughts you're spewing in this meeting?"
At its best, it teaches you how to find and organize evidence to make a point, convince people of something, and get things done.
At worst, well... those skills can be employed by people robotically going to create meaningless (or harmful) advice that a company already knows, for lots of $$$ wasted. Like so much else, it is often a reflection of the capability and state of the person paying for the work. You get someone who's under lots of deadline pressures, dug themselves into a bad budget hole, doesn't know what good work looks like, and you're gonna get a shitty consulting output that makes the headlines (or makes people remember) that consultants can produce lots of BS.
This is actually a great point. You’ll encounter company that ask “Why are my sales falling?” when you ask what they’ve looked at so far it’s often a handful of stab-in-the-dark strategies with no coordination or logic to the approach.
Even just helping a company come up with a rationale plan to identify key issues and succinctly communicate that to leadership is a huge benefit.
It's about understanding how to organize thoughts and present a point in a way that an executive would want to make a decision on a topic. (When it goes the way it should.)
After a stint in consulting, you sometimes have meetings with people you work with up and down the chain in a company, and you wonder, "my god, how do you get through every day with the disorganized jumble of random thoughts you're spewing in this meeting?"
At its best, it teaches you how to find and organize evidence to make a point, convince people of something, and get things done.
At worst, well... those skills can be employed by people robotically going to create meaningless (or harmful) advice that a company already knows, for lots of $$$ wasted. Like so much else, it is often a reflection of the capability and state of the person paying for the work. You get someone who's under lots of deadline pressures, dug themselves into a bad budget hole, doesn't know what good work looks like, and you're gonna get a shitty consulting output that makes the headlines (or makes people remember) that consultants can produce lots of BS.