How to learn consulting skills without joining a consulting firm

“How do I learn consulting?” covers three different questions. If you want to get hired by a firm, the path and the recruiting process are in how to become a strategy consultant. If you want to build an independent practice, that is a business problem before it is a skills problem, and the freelance strategy consulting playbook covers it. This post is about the third question: how to be able to do what consultants do, in whatever job you have, and where to get that skill.

I learned it inside McKinsey and BCG, and also in my work at two other firms, and I’ve taught it since.

Many consultants don’t quite know how to teach consulting in a simple way, because the firms teach most of it on the job

The practical consulting skill set can be seen through the lens of a problem-solving process.

Break a vague question into parts that don’t overlap and don’t leave gaps, which is MECE. State a hypothesis before you have data and build an issue tree to test it. Do the analysis, then ask “so what?” of every result until only the ones that change the answer are left. Communicate conclusion first, which is the Pyramid Principle. Put it on a page whose title is a complete sentence, so an executive can read the titles alone and get the argument.

A lot of this is simple, but what enables people to become great consultants is having your ideas and work challenged in front of others who can coach you, on real problems. Both Bain and McKinsey are explicit that this is how they teach. Bain’s careers site describes it plainly: “We operate under an apprenticeship model, so you learn directly from senior leaders.” Formal training is periodic, in cohorts, in person: “We periodically gather you and a cohort of peers in person in cities like Los Angeles, Singapore, or Barcelona to prepare you for the next phase of your career.” And the trainers are not trainers by profession: “We draw our trainers from senior leadership, so you’ll learn from people who’ve succeeded in your role.”

McKinsey’s version, from its careers blog: “Everyone who joins McKinsey, regardless of role, goes through One Firm Onboarding during their first week here.” After that: “Apprenticeship, feedback, mentorship, and peer-to-peer connections happen every day—in the team room, over coffee, in the office, over Slack, or through specialty communities.”

Marvin Bower wrote in his privately printed Perspective on McKinsey that “During the five fiscal years ending with 1976, we brought in more than 400 new consultants. These consultants cannot learn the professional approach just from reading the Code and from hearing it discussed at the Introductory Training Program.” Harvey Golub, a former McKinsey partner, is quoted in Elizabeth Haas Edersheim’s McKinsey’s Marvin Bower: “The training program was not just a skills development program, it was an acculturation process. One of the things that McKinsey did was have the leaders of the firm do the teaching.”

When I first started in consulting, I took a course called Basic Consulting Readiness at McKinsey and it was incredibly powerful, but the power of the course was mostly enabling me to see problems and information in different ways and to know when to use different approaches, tools, and frameworks in the right situation. What really enabled me to radically improve, though, was the series of months after the training in which I was able to get real-time feedback on what I learned and see dramatic improvement.

A better way to “learn” consulting is to actually try some of the work

Consulting is a weird industry in that it has this sexy, prestigious halo around it. Many people read about what consultants do, but don’t really know what that looks like on a day-to-day basis.

The exercises below are a sample of various things you might work on. Try them and get a feel for what it’s like.

If you find these interesting, my course takes much of this further.

The first correction a new consultant usually gets is on structure. Before any analysis happens, the question gets broken into parts, and the test for the breakdown is whether it is MECE: no overlaps, no gaps. Get this wrong and the team analyzes the same thing twice and misses something else entirely.

Every page in a consulting deck has a sentence for a title, and the title is what gets reviewed first. It can only claim what the page proves.

Consulting analysis starts from the answer you think is true and goes looking for the evidence that would kill it fastest.

The question a team room runs on is “so what?” It is how a finding gets separated from a fact, and it gets asked of every page before the client sees it.

The firms no longer agree on whether juniors still learn the skill on the job

Duff McDonald describes the economics in The Firm: “In the 1990s McKinsey’s revenues grew almost four times while the partnership grew by only two and a half. Associate leverage—the measure of associates relative to partners in the firm—grew from two to one to four to one by the end of the decade.” Those associates were the people doing the analysis and learning the skill by doing it.

McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, said on HBR’s IdeaCast in January 2026 that “the stuff that I did when I joined as an associate 32 years ago, we wouldn’t consider even doing right now. Why? Because clients do that stuff themselves.” Kate Smaje, who leads technology and AI at the firm, said in a Bloomberg interview carried by Fortune: “Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that.”

Bain’s answer is to keep hiring them. Its UK managing partner, Clare Gordon, told The Times in June 2026, as reported by City AM, that the firm “needs juniors working alongside more senior experts, so they can develop the judgment, the expertise, the pattern knowledge of how you drive change through organisations.”

BCG ran a randomized trial on 758 of its own consultants with academic researchers, and the paper found that AI made them faster and their work higher rated, but on a task built to resemble a real client problem they were “19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions compared to those without AI.” The mechanism: “Professionals who had a negative performance when using AI tended to blindly adopt its output and interrogate it less.” Judging when an analysis is wrong is what the apprenticeship taught, and the three firms now differ on how much of that work juniors will still do.

Interview prep and firm recruiting content are what a search for consulting courses returns first

A Google search for consulting courses in September 2026 returned case-interview preparation before anything else. It teaches you to solve a stylized business problem out loud in forty minutes so a firm will hire you. It is a real skill, and it is a hiring hurdle rather than the job itself. Courses organized around “market sizing,” “profitability cases,” and “market entry frameworks” are training for the interview.

I’ve made the case against the value of case practice, in an article and video on whether consulting case interviews actually work.

The second is recruiting content from the firms themselves. BCG’s Introduction to Strategy Consulting on Forage is free, takes one to two hours, and has you generate revenue ideas for a fictional luxury clothing company. Its stated purpose is to “Stand out in your application to BCG.”

Certifications come up too. They exist for independent and internal consultants. But certifications really don’t have much status in the broader consulting industry. Clients mostly care about past experience and the kinds of clients you’ve worked with. Plus, it’s easier to demonstrate competence by communicating information, either in conversations or reports, than it is by saying, “Hey, I have this credential.”

The practitioner courses cost under $900; the university programs cost $3,200 to $9,400

These figures are from the providers’ own pages in September 2026, for options positioned as learning the work rather than passing the interview.

I think all these courses can help and are really good at introducing you to ideas you may have never been exposed to before. I think one thing that shocked me working in consulting was how valuable the tools and frameworks were and how I had never been taught to approach work in this way until I worked at these firms. It’s what inspired me to create StrategyU, though, and teach this knowledge through a course. The goal with my course really is to get you excited about the ideas, give you simple ways to practice them, and then to encourage you to practice and apply them as fast as possible.

Outside a firm, the thing to rebuild is the review loop

The books written by people who worked at the firms are the place to start. Ethan Rasiel’s The McKinsey Way and The McKinsey Mind describe the working method in the first person, and Barbara Minto’s The Pyramid Principle is the source for top-down communication. There is a five-month self-study plan with a reading order and practice exercises on this site already.

What no book gives you is the review. A former McKinsey associate, quoted in Paul Friga’s The McKinsey Engagement, describes his first study: “My pride in the 200-page slide deck was destroyed at my first progress meeting with the engagement manager. She must have said ‘so what’ 180 times as she literally tore each irrelevant slide out of the deck and threw it to the floor.” Outside a firm you have to rebuild that yourself: someone who has done the work and will look at yours. A manager who came from a firm can do it, and a course with feedback can do part of it. A model can play the role too, with the caveat the BCG trial gives you: you have to be good enough to know when it is wrong.

The two objects below are what that review gets applied to. The first is what a first-year hands the engagement manager on day two of a study, before any data exists: the title is the hypothesis and the chart is a sketch of what would prove it. If the title survives the review, the analyst goes and gets the numbers.

The second is the issue tree behind the first quiz question. Each branch is one analysis someone owns, nothing overlaps, and the “so what” of any branch can be stated as a sentence.

If you want to start this week, take a question your own organization is arguing about and write the MECE breakdown of it, the way the first exercise asks. Draft the ghost slide for the answer you believe, with a full-sentence title. Then find one person who has done this work and ask them to say “so what?” to it. The exercises above tell you whether you have the ideas, and that review tells you whether you can do the work.