Consulting Is Still Worth Doing, Even Now

A walk-back, sort of. The industry is a worse destination than it used to be. It is still one of the best on-ramps in Indian professional life.

Guest post!

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A few weeks after the consulting piece on this Substack went out, a reader emailed me. He was a B-school second-year with two offers - MBB and a Series C startup operating role. He’d taken the startup role. He wrote: “Your piece pushed me toward this decision. I just wanted to thank you.”

I appreciated the email. Then I worried about it.

Worried because the consulting piece argued that the industry is changing, the pyramid is breaking, and that the path looks different now. It did not argue that you shouldn’t enter consulting. Several readers, including this one, took the second meaning. I want to correct the record.

This piece is the contrarian counterpoint to the earlier one. It will sound like a walk-back. It isn’t, exactly — both pieces can be true. The argument: consulting in 2026 is a worse destination than it used to be, but it remains one of the best on-ramps in Indian professional life for a meaningful slice of MBA grads. The two are different claims, and conflating them produces bad career decisions.

Why consulting still works as an on-ramp

Five things, in order of how much I think they matter.

1. Training arbitrage. The first two to three years of MBB or top-tier Big 4 consulting still produce more business-skill-per-month than any other entry-level white-collar job in India. The structured training in problem-solving, communication, financial analysis, and stakeholder management is genuine. It’s also unusually compressed - you’ll work on five or six different industries in your first eighteen months, see ten or twelve different operating models, and develop a kind of business pattern-matching that’s hard to build elsewhere.

The cleanest test of this: take any senior operator at any Indian unicorn whose career started in consulting. Ask them privately what those first few years gave them. Almost all of them will say some version of “the way I think about business problems was built there.” The consulting industry is overrated as a destination and underrated as a school. The school part is still real.

2. Network arbitrage. The MBB / top Big 4 alumni network in India is, in 2026, the single most useful career network outside of the IIT/IIM core itself. Twenty years of alumni have now seeded the senior tiers of Indian PE, corporate, and startup leadership. The number of CEO and senior-leader inbound calls that happen because someone went to McKinsey with someone else, fifteen years ago, is meaningful. By year ten of your career, the alumni network is often a bigger career asset than the firm experience itself.

3. Brand premium that’s still real, just for less time. The brand effect of “ex-MBB” or “ex-Big 4 strategy” on your resume still moves the needle in 2026, but the half-life has shortened. It carries you for the first 5-7 years of your post-consulting career; after that, what you’ve actually built matters more than what firm you came from. If you’re in your early 30s and still leaning on the brand line, you’ve probably stopped compounding. But for the first decade, the brand still opens doors that wouldn’t otherwise open.

4. Optionality that compounds early. Consulting still produces a wider set of credible exit options than almost any other entry path. Tech operating roles, PE / VC, corporate strategy, family-office operating roles, founder paths, even lateral moves to other professional services — all of them recruit aggressively from consulting alumni in the 3-7 year band. The optionality narrows over time (consulting is a less useful resume line at year ten than at year four), but the early optionality is genuinely valuable, especially for someone who doesn’t yet know which sector they want to commit to.

5. The judgment skill, which is increasingly rare. This is the underrated one. The thing consulting is unusually good at teaching, even now, is how to think about a problem you’ve never seen before with limited information and produce a defensible answer in two weeks. That skill is becoming rarer in a workforce that increasingly specializes early. The consulting kid who’s done this thirty times by age 26 has a structural advantage when she becomes the senior strategist or the founder, because her cold-start time on any new problem is a third of her peers’.

Where the earlier piece’s argument still holds

I’m not retracting the earlier critique. The pyramid is breaking. AI is eating the bottom of it. GCCs are eating the middle. Many partner roles are not going to make the kind of money the previous generation of partners made. All of that is true, and any MBA student making this decision should factor it in.

But here’s the distinction that matters. The expected value of the partner-track gamble has gone down. The value of the first 3-7 years of consulting has not gone down nearly as much. If you’re making a 25-year career decision based on the partner odds, the math has worsened. If you’re making a 5-year career decision based on the on-ramp value, the math is roughly the same as it was in 2018.

Most MBA students I talk to are conflating these. They’re rejecting consulting based on the long-term picture when their actual decision is short-term — what they should be optimizing for is the on-ramp, with an eye toward leaving deliberately around year five or six. Treat consulting like a great undergraduate program from a pricey school: the ROI is on what comes next, not on whether you stay forever.

When NOT to do consulting

To be useful, the case for consulting needs to come with the cases against. There are several.

Don’t do consulting if you already know your sector. The single biggest reason consulting is valuable is the breadth — exposure to many industries before you commit. If you already know you want to spend your career in, say, climate tech or healthcare or PE, the breadth is wasted on you. You’d be better served joining a serious operator in that sector immediately. By year three, you’ll be deeper than your consulting peer who is still doing case-team rotations.

Don’t do consulting if you’re a builder, not a thinker. Some people learn fastest by making things. The consulting environment — slides, frameworks, recommendations to clients — frustrates them. They get more out of building one product than from analyzing thirty businesses. If you’re that kind of person, you’ll be miserable in consulting for two years before you figure out you should leave. Save the time and just don’t enter.

Don’t do consulting if you can’t take the lifestyle for at least three years. The hours are real. The travel is real (less than it was, but still real). The constant context-switching is real. People who try to do consulting on a balanced lifestyle tend to do it badly and learn less than they should. If your life situation in your mid-20s requires significant work-life flexibility — kids, dependent parents, a partner with extreme demands — the on-ramp is harder to extract.

Don’t do consulting only for the brand or comp. This is the most common bad reason. If the only thing you can articulate about why you want to do consulting is “the brand on my CV” or “the package,” you’ve already given away that you don’t actually want the job. The people who get the most out of consulting are the ones who like the work — who are actually energized by case-cracking, by client problem-solving, by structured analysis. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, the brand premium isn’t enough to make it worth your decade.

What the right consulting tenure looks like in 2026

For most people who do enter consulting now, the optimal exit is somewhere between year four and year seven.

Year zero to three: pure absorption. You’re learning frameworks, building speed, accumulating reps. The compounding is enormous; don’t even think about leaving.

Year three to five: the inflection. You can now do real work; you have the ability to lead workstreams, influence client decisions, and build relationships. This is when the network value starts to compound. Most of the big “lateral” decisions — leaving for a startup, joining PE, going into corporate strategy — are made in this band.

Year five to seven: diminishing returns on staying, increasing returns on leaving. The brand value is at its peak in the market. Your skill build is starting to flatten relative to what you’d build in operating roles. This is when the strongest operators leave. The marginal year of staying is increasingly less valuable than the marginal year of building somewhere else.

Year seven and beyond: you should have a specific reason to be there. Either you’re committed to making partner (with eyes open about the odds), or you have a unique role that’s giving you something you can’t get elsewhere. Default-staying past year seven is one of the most common career mistakes I watch consultants make.

A reframe for the reader who took the startup role

To the reader who emailed me: you might have made the right call. I don’t know your specifics. The Series C startup you joined could be a winner; in that case, the equity upside, the speed of skill-building, and the network you’ll build will dwarf what you would’ve gotten from MBB.

But here’s what I want you to consider, and what I should have said more clearly the first time. The case against consulting that I made was a case against the long-arc partner gamble. It was not a case against the on-ramp. If you’d taken the MBB offer, used it as a school for three to five years, and then left to join the same kind of startup at a Director or VP level, you’d likely be in a stronger position than where you’d be from joining the Series C cold today. The skipped on-ramp is not free.

That’s the distinction every MBA student making this decision should hold in their head. Consulting is overrated as a destination. It is still vastly underrated as an on-ramp for someone whose career arc isn’t yet committed.

The question to ask isn’t “is consulting still good?” It’s “is the version of me at year five that consulting would build the version I want to start the next decade as?” For some people, yes. For others, no. Both are valid. But conflate them and you’ll either over-romanticize the path you didn’t take or under-value the one you did.

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That’s all for now!

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