Most of the discussion about joining consulting I’ve seen on here and Reddit is for students concerned about study time and work/life balance. I’m an FSA with management experience. I’ve spend all of my career so far with insurance companies and I have had a lot of success in those environments. I’m considering a role with a consulting firm and have some apprehension about if I’ll still be able to be successful in such a different environment. I mostly know people who’ve gone from consulting to companies, not the other way around. I’d love to hear from anyone who has made the switch to consulting and how it went.
Also, if you’re in consulting/audit maybe you could answer some questions about how the work is structured, like:
How are you chosen for a particular engagement?
Are you asked before getting assigned to a project?
How do you become known within the company for particular skill sets or areas of expertise?
If you’re managing a project, do you get to choose your team?
Can you actually take a vacation or is it true you’re basically always on call?
Everything is pretty much “it depends.” It depends on the company, office, industry, culture, politics…
Except the vacation thing. You’ll never be able to truly unplug. Billable hours and the client are god. You’ll have to work 10-12 hour days to hit your annual billable hours goal and even if you do reach it, you answer to the client. Always.
My advice: if you value work/life balance, it’s a mistake. Others will have a different take.
I’ve only worked at a consulting firm, so I don’t have any basis of comparison to how it works at other companies. I’ve never been high enough on a client where I’m the person principally in charge, so I feel like I’m not able to answer all your questions (even just for how it works for me, aside from the very valid “it depends” aspect). The questions I can answer with respect to me:
Am I asked before getting assigned to a project? When I was a new analyst, no, not really. I wasn’t on any clients yet, and I had no experience, so there wouldn’t really have been an excuse to say “no” to a client. I could have protested, I suppose, and my bosses would have considered my point of view, but it’s not like there was specifically a discussion before a project was assigned. Now that I’m more experienced and have a more full workload, I am typically asked if I think the project would be a good fit or if I have any concerns about taking on the project.
Can I actually take a vacation? I feel like I can. At least annually I’ll go on a week long trip, and I don’t bring my laptop, and I don’t have a work phone. Next week I’ll take the whole week off (except maybe Friday) to take a test, and I’ll probably log into email once or twice, but I also could get away with not. If I was the person principally in charge of a client I think it would be harder to do that—at a minimum I’d need to have someone else the client could reach out to in my absence.
To NerdAlert’s point, my hours target takes for granted that I will work more than my scheduled hours—I cannot hit the target without working more than my scheduled hours. The “scheduled hours” are to be interpreted as a minimum hours per day/week, not as an expected number of hours per day/week. There are ebbs and flows in the workload, where some weeks I’ll need to put in a lot of extra time. Often I’ll need to put in more hours before and/or after taking time off, as the work still needs to get done.
But I almost never work on weekends, and when I’m not logged into my laptop, I’m completely away from work; I don’t have work on my phone or anything (though some of my colleagues do). I do have concerns for the future—as I work my way up higher, will I lose the ability to have work/life balance?—but for now I feel like my work/life balance is…at least pretty good. I’m almost done with my last exam, and I’m hoping that will free up some time.
Growing up my dad worked in IT and often was on call day and night…I’m glad that no one is going to call me in the middle of the night for an emergency, at least.
I think a lot depends on what sort of consulting you are going to be doing. It could be for one of the big 4 accounting firms who all have fairly robust actuarial departments, some that deal with auditing and some that handle business and process consulting. I’ve only been in life so I don’t know how much P&C would differ, although my firm did do both.
Then there are actuarial consulting firms. I was part of one of those for many years as well. In those cases, the principals and other senior leaders are typically bringing in the work and they spend a lot of time traveling and meeting with current and potential clients.
It also depends very much on the size of the firm. I was at a small firm with maybe 5 or 6 actuaries and no support staff up to one of the big 4 accounting firms. If we knew a bit more about the general environment, I think we could tailor our responses better.
I have never had trouble taking vacation, although I don’t take a lot of it. I have a co-worker who takes 5 weeks a year though. When I am on vacation, I don’t usually do any work other than keeping up on e-mails, mostly to make sure I don’t 100 to deal with when I get back. There is always coverage while on vacation and if I do need to take a critical call, I don’t really mind as it is rare for me and my projects.
Another thing to think about is the nature of the engagements. Are they long term or short term? I’ve been on multi-year engagements as well as some that only lasted 6 weeks. It is much harder to disconnect from shorter engagements as there is almost always something due each week.
Also, what sort of projects would you be working on? Is it purely audits, coding, process modeling, conversions of some type? Each of these have very different project paths. Might help to see if you can get some clarity around some of these issues to help you see what the day to day and month to month work is like.
I don’t work for a consulting firm, but consulting is the right word for what I do. Find the sweet spot where you’re doing consulting work but not for billable hours and you’ll be living your best life. (Think insurance-adjacent companies, like software).
I am looking at larger firms (think Big 4 or Milliman/Towers/etc). I’m not keen on the idea of “selling” and having goals for bringing in business, so the audit side is a little more appealing than just project engagement work. I want to strategize and oversee work and execute projects, not deal with the pitching and networking for leads (networking for relationships is fine).
I appreciate hearing people can take vacation and just scan emails once a day. That’s been my habit up to now. However, billable hours being unattainable with 8 hour workdays and holiday/vacation time is a rather big red flag.
I am going through the interview process and will hear what this specific firm’s practices are. My sweet spot would probably be for a partner to bring in the business and then tag me to be point person for day-to-day execution and team leadership.
If you are thinking about big 4 and auditing, it is very unlikely that as an FSA, you would be expected to bring in business. The audit work is pretty well set. The partners and principals would do most of the upselling, like IFRS17, etc. Most likely, at your level, you would be overseeing a portion of an audit. You would be looking at the work from the staff and seniors on stat/GAAP/tax reserves and any other insurance related issues. I don’t think you would be getting into other parts of the audit, like claims paying, cash management, etc.
In audit, there are definitely windows where vacation is less likely to be approved, but there are a lot of down periods where you could easily take vacation. Think November through March as being tougher to get vacation time. Much easier in the summer and fall though. I’ve seen one actuarial auditor arrange for part time and she worked half years around the audit schedule. Based on the company, you may have opportunities to get involved in non audit work in the off-season. Note that this is assuming big 4. Can’t speak to Milliman type firms.