Transitioning from Medicine to Management Consulting
In recent times, I've noticed a surge of posts on social media highlighting doctors leaving the NHS to pursue new careers in management consulting. I completely support their decisions, and this blog is not intended to criticise them. However, I do believe there's been a slight lack of transparency regarding these career moves.
To provide some context, I am not yet a doctor but a medical student, so I haven't fully experienced the stresses of working in the NHS. However, from an outsider's perspective during placements, it’s no secret that doctors are overworked—often working night shifts and weekends, controlled by their rotas—and in return, their compensation is below what they truly deserve. It makes perfect sense for doctors to look elsewhere for careers where they feel more appreciated and fairly compensated. This coincides perfectly with management consulting companies seeking bright individuals who can be moulded into professionals capable of working on constantly varying projects.
But let’s be clear: If you think you’ll be making major decisions for companies and shaping the world around you right from the start, that just isn’t true. The reality is that as doctors leave the NHS, they will be thrown into the corporate world. While their internship teams might have been lovely, things change once you’re in the actual job. You’ll need to get used to your contribution involving a lot of number-crunching in Excel and perfecting PowerPoint presentations. You might find yourself frustrated when a title shifts from slide 15 to slide 129, and the partner is now urgently messaging you because they need to know what to say in a meeting. The partner, after all, is the face of the project and will agree to deadlines before passing the work onto the team. Your task is to meet those deadlines, which often means working beyond the standard 9-5 and even on weekends.
Before you know it, your global client might refuse to meet over the phone, leading you to carry your suitcase through the airport to catch an economy class flight to the Middle East for a 72-hour visit. While this can be a great experience, it may not be ideal in the long run when these trips become a weekly occurrence, forcing you to miss important family events. This may not sound so appealing, but you might wonder why people stay in the job.
Let’s be honest: You have the choice to be worked to the bone in the NHS as a doctor, earning a £32K-£37K salary, or to shift to a management consulting job where, as an associate at BCG, you’ll start with a £50K-£60K salary (according to Glassdoor). By the time you’re a manager, roughly 36 months into the job, you’ll be competing with the salaries of NHS consultants, and you’ll have plenty of room for growth. Once you reach the partner level, everything changes, and salaries become even more substantial.
It's also worth mentioning the bottlenecks in medicine. Advancing from one stage of training to the next is not guaranteed, and all specialties require jumping through numerous hoops to secure a training post. At the end of the day, there’s no guarantee of landing a job in your preferred specialty. Frustrated by not securing your chosen specialty, you might consider shifting to management consulting. However, it's important to realise that you haven’t escaped the bottlenecks. Now, you’ll be working harder than ever to prove to your partner that you deserve a promotion. Your utilisation will be scrutinised, and the aspects of your work that you want to be assessed might not be the ones that are. Ultimately, it comes down to your partner's decision on whether you're worth a promotion. This is all before you hear that firms like McKinsey & Co. are implementing their "up or out" policy, where you’re expected to gain promotion within a particular timeframe or exit the firm.
Before anyone criticises my decision to include two of the MBB firms here, I want to clarify that these are the most competitive firms in the management consulting space. With that competitiveness comes highly competitive salaries. So, if you’re looking to exit medicine to secure one of these lucrative positions, this is the reality.
The key point I want to emphasise is that there are many factors to consider before making the shift from medicine to management consulting. Management consulting is a highly competitive field where you will work just as hard as before to earn the rewards on offer, which are not guaranteed. Management consulting should not be viewed as the easier option; it is merely an alternative. If this field appeals to you, you should absolutely explore it. But don’t be swayed by the glamorous offices and mirrored lifts that people post about online—this is not the reality of the job. In the end, we spend a significant portion of our lives working, so pursue the job you will enjoy the most and don’t let a single factor dictate your decisions.
