Beyond Consulting
Find the right exit opportunities for you
Most of us join consulting to develop skills and experience needed to solve large, interesting problems for organizations that matter. Every review cycle, we recommend keeping one eye on your growth, and one eye on the opportunities to leverage those skills where they're needed most.
At Consultants for Impact, we encourage designing careers around around the world's most important problems— where each additional person working on the issue has the potential to make a significant difference. Researchers at Oxford and global think tanks have identified two sub-categories of these problems:
1. reducing global threats of pandemics, misaligned AI, and nuclear war, and
2. improving the well-being of people and animals through cost-effective interventions
Many CFI consultants have left corporate consulting behind to pursue careers in AI policy, animal proteins, international development, effective philanthropy (and more!) – and are eager to connect with other consultants exploring those fields.
Consulting skills - quantitative and qualitative analysis, writing and synthesis, stakeholder management, public speaking, and more – transfer well into more critical areas for global impact than you might think.
Effective career planning, much like a strategy consulting project, requires us consider a wide range of options, build a hypothesis, and then test it.
Which of these seem interesting to you?
Sample high-impact career paths:
To support you on your career planning journey, here are some of our favorite resources from our organizational partners, who have spent years mapping various skills and backgrounds to success in high-impact roles.
We keep this list updated, so check back in soon!
by Horizon Institute for Public Service
It may sound radical to take time off work and spend weeks or months reflecting on potential career paths, but many of our members who landed high-impact roles say that looking back it’s the best decision they made.
Careers are long – 80,000 hours, on average. We know that strategic planning is important to the outcome of our projects. Given how important our careers are, it’s not unreasonable to spend closer to 1% (800+ hours) thinking deeply about how to make the most of it.
Consulting work is demanding, and it can be difficult or impossible to find time to think deeply and consider alternative career paths.
Consultants can get stuck on achievement escalators at a young age, with little opportunity to pause and ask, “What do I personally value and enjoy?”
The value of three months of continuing the work you were doing before pales in comparison to the life-changing insights you may find during a leave.
time off by:
- Meeting with coaches to discover your strengths
- Booking coffee chats with other Consultants for Impact members or friends in the career paths you're considering
- Applying to roles, taking short contracts, or work trials to test your fit for a range of options
- Going deeper with personal reflections, meditations, or writing
- Reconnecting with loved ones and lost hobbies
“My career plans have completely changed since speaking with CFI. I was already headed down the impact route, but talking with a Consultants for Impact advisor helped solidify that and gave me a sense that a fulfilling career (that paid reasonably) was within my grasp despite my timeline and constraints.”
"Via Consultants for Impact I met many colleagues who were pursuing social impact in a focused, ambitious, and analytical way, which motivated me to center my work around the same principles. A few years later, one of these connections helped me land a job with a world-leading biosecurity team at MIT, leading me to pivot my career."
“After talking with Consultants for Impact, I accelerated the decision to do nonprofit high-impact entrepreneurship by 5-10 years. I always wanted to go into a high-impact career, but CFI made a big difference in bringing me closer to the community, some of whom are founding nonprofit start-ups themselves.”
"Thanks to this community, I am now super settled in my path to impact. Consultants for Impact provides a community of like-minded people that can encourage you to take the "risky" step of exiting consulting, or to think more critically about the opportunities you want to take.”
"At the Consultants for Impact retreat, I met ex-consultants who are using their stills to make a positive impact on the world. It motivated and inspired my own career change"
“You will meet amazing people, and your career path might change for the better.”
"I felt more comfortable in my career shift especially in interviews with companies since I had been acclimated with people with similar interests to do good in the world."
