Where

do consultants
go?

The movemeon ranking of 2016

consulting destinations

Where do consultants go? Which industries,

functions and/or locations do they hope to move
to after consulting? Back in 2016, we wrote
a piece discussing the geographical flows of
consulting talent. This time, we look at
applications more broadly. We analyse the close
to 20,000 applications made for permanent jobs
in 2016 to show you where consultants really
want to go.

INDUSTRIES

What prompted me to start thinking about this

analysis was another one of our older

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pieces, summarising a survey of consultants dream
jobs: as early as 2015, we asked you to rank your top
exit destinations. Back then, your dream industry was
Private Equity, followed closely by Start-up. A lot
has happened since that poll. Movemeon has grown,
attracting more great employers and more amazing
candidates. This means that more jobs have been
posted and more applications have been made, giving
us an excellent opportunity to check whether 2015s
preferences are reflected in 2016s behaviour.

Market flows and trends

Lets look at flows and market trends first of all.

Private Equity (combined with Venture Capital in
our data) is in third place, making up 10.89% of
2016s applications for permanent jobs. Start-up is
the outright winner when it comes to supply and
demand, with growth stage start-ups receiving
24.59% of applications, and even early-stage start-
ups managing to make it to 4th place, suggesting that
even the youngest members of the industry can be
attractive to consultants. But the real surprise
performance comes from the second-place
holder: Boutique consultancy. 13.15% of all
permanent applications in 2016 were for boutique

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consulting positions. Consultants on movemeon
might have been ready to change jobs, but not all
were ready to leave consulting altogether.

Popularity

But what about the original question does 2016s

behaviour reflect 2015s preferences? We can get to
the answer to this question by using the proxy of
number of applications/individual role in given
industry.

So, has Private Equity fallen from the dream exit

industry it was in 2015 to the mere third-place holder
it is in terms of market flows? The answer to the last
question is a categorical no. The marker of
applications/role reveals PE & VC to be a far more
popular industry than suggested simply by

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application flows it is, in fact, the single most
popular one. Media & telecoms, in second place,
saw only 57% of PE & VCs application rate, while
for Start-up, the industry that came first for market
flows, that number is 38%. PE & VC is the
unquestionable winner of most popular industry in
2016.

Did the consultants of 2016 go to the industries

shown in the 2015 poll? Mostly, they did. Private
Equity and Start-up were still popular choices, as
were Media & telecoms and Ecommerce. The new-
comer was Hospitality, leisure & travel, rising to
third place nearly out of nowhere, with 43% of PE &
VCs application rate.

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FUNCTIONS

Market flows and trends

Having considered industries, the obvious next step

is to look at functions lets start with market trends
again.

There were no real surprises here. Movemeons

consulting community is dominated by strategy
consultants, and over 50% of all 2016 applications
for permanent jobs were for Strategy. Operations
and General management followed Strategy at
quite a significant drop, receiving 10.29% and 9.33%
of all applications respectively. Corporate &
business development and Programme, project &
change management also made it to the top 5, while
the top 10 also included Marketing and the lesser-
known Right-hand to CEO/chief of staff.

We have recently started a series of events on

moving to and working in strategy, so it was good to
see that these events support a real trend in our
community. If you missed the last event, you can
find a summary of all the advice given by the CEOs
of PizzaHut and Charles Taylor here.

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Popularity

As we saw earlier, market flows and trends, although

interesting in their own right, dont necessarily tell us
about popularity. So, lets see if, as before, the proxy
of applications/role tells a different story about our
communitys preferences. (Spoiler alert: it does.)

For a start, Strategy is no longer in first place. It is,

instead, 5th, with only 18% of the first-place holders
application rate. So which function managed to out-
do Strategy so impressively? Analytics & big data.
Even Right-hand to the CEO/chief off staff, in
second place, only managed 34% of Analytics & big
datas application rate, making it clear that there is a
strong preference in our community for the latter. In
third place, Product management (instead of

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General management, in third place for market
trends) saw just 20% of Analytics & big datas
applications/role, again confirming the latter as
2016s most popular function.

So what does this analysis of functions tell us?

That most consultants are looking for a real
change of career when they come to movemeon.
They want hands-on roles with real impact, and
they want to move away from the broadness of
Strategy.

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LOCATIONS

Market flows and trends

The last thing to look at in this analysis is where in

the world consultants go. As youll have come to
expect by now, well start with market flows and
trends again.

In 2016, about 62% of applications for permanent

roles were for jobs based in the United Kingdom,
making it the winner of application flows. Nearly
three-quarters of these applications came from
consultants already based in the UK. The remaining
quarter was submitted by candidates living as far as
New Delhi and as close as Paris, with most living in
Europe. Also among the top 5 locations by
application number were the US Northeast and
France. The former was in second place at 6.72%,
the latter in third place at 6.44%.

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Popularity

The relative orders of the US Northeast and

France in the chart above are interesting because
they do not reflect the number of roles available in
these regions (there France is ahead of the US
Northeast). So lets have a look at applications/role
for locations. Was the US Northeast more popular
than France by this marker too?

Yes, it was. In 2016, the US Northeasts application

rate was two percentage points higher than that of
France. But neither actually made it the top 5 for
popularity. So, which locations were most popular?
The United Arab Emirates, Switzerland,
Singapore, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom. Although it saw over 62% of all

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applications, the UKs application rate was only 33%
of that of the UAE, which was only enough to make
the UK the 5th most popular location. The UAE was
only 5th by application flows because there were
fewer roles, and so fewer applications, there. But
applications/role show a striking pattern: although
there are fewer opportunities in the UEA, the ones
that are available are extremely popular. Consultants
from all over the world wanted to move to jobs based
there, as well as in Switzerland, Singapore and the
Netherlands.

It appears that there is an interesting group of people

in our community who are quite keen to relocate to a
different country and an equally interesting group
who want to leave the UK. We hope these
consultants like what they find in their new locations
and that they let us know! (Email us if you ever

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want to tell us about your experiences of relocating
to a different country!)

The original article was published here.

At movemeon, we regularly publish advice on job

discovery, applications, CVs & cover letters, hiring
and leadership. If you want to see some of our older
content, why not visit our blog?

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