Dear Gagan2001,
Thanks for your post! It's great to see that you have begun the process of planning your goals and targeting MBA programs. While you've posed a very open-ended question (nearly any MBA progam will give you the basic education you might need to be a management consultant), I've offered a few ideas below.
One way to view the MBA is as "a means to an end" - in your case, you might view it as the key to taking you from the technical arena of ERP consulting to more high-level/strategic area of management consulting. Doing this might lead to several questions:
1) Which MBA programs are strongest in areas like general management, strategy, cost accounting, operations, case-based learning, etc?
2) Which management consulting firms will you be targeting? Where do these firms source their MBA hires?
3) Where do you want to work in the short and long-term? India? The US? Europe? This could potentially help you further narrow the field (since most schools are best suited to place candidates in their region and studies have shown that a high percentage of graduates end up within 5 hours travel of their MBA program's campus).
4) Do you have an area of interest beyond consulting? For example, are you hoping to do strategy consulting in the tech or telecom sector? If so, you might target schools that have strengths in this area as well.
5) Do you want a part-time or full-time experience? Traditional MBA or executive MBA? 1 year or 2?
To give you an example as to how this might work, let's say that you wanted to work for a company like McKinsey and ultimately focus on consulting in the telecom sector. As such, you might look for a school with strengths in both strategtic management and telecommunications strategy. You'd also want to be sure that the school sends a good number of graduates to work for McKinsey each year. The resulting list of schools might include Wharton, INSEAD, Stanford and HBS - among others.
In terms of resources you might use, I'd advise the following:
-Review the schools' web sites to get a better sense of their academic offerings and career placement statistics.
-Look at a variety of rankings (US News, BW, the FT, etc) - but take them with a grain of salt - not as the final word.
-Beyond rankings, consider reading independent research reports that can provide objective analysis of the schools and how they compare. I'll make a blatant plug for the Clear Admit School Guides (
www.clearadmit.com/guides) in this regard.
-Talk to current students and alums at the schools you investigate
-If possible, set up an information interview with someone working in management consulting to learn more about their job. Ask them where their firm hires MBA graduates from, etc.
Hopefully my comments provide you with a good start to your school research process. If you'd like a more in-depth assessment of your candidacy and how it fits with specific progams, send along your resume to
[email protected] and set up a free session with one of our counselors.
Best of luck,
Graham
