Having an MBA is not the most important factor
in a consulting job
says Hubertus Drinkuth, of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants
I have been working with Roland Berger on and off since 1994. I first worked for them in Munich and was then transferred to Tokyo from where I also began to work on China. I left Roland Berger to work for two years in e-commerce where I learned that all that glitters is not gold. Then I returned to Roland Berger in 2002 and was hired by the China office. I have the responsibilities of a project manager covering a variety of sectors. Our operations here are quite different from our competitors' - in China. we are a Chinese company. Overall there are only four non-Chinese staff, even the partners are Chinese. We require people who think, speak, read and behave in Chinese. If we are serving one of the big state-owned companies here, we really need to manage them differently from a European client.
Consequently when we are recruiting staff, we are focusing on the top talent in China. We do still keep an eye on the international schools and we do look for applicants with fluent spoken and written Mandarin from overseas too.
From my own personal point of view, as a management consultant with us you may be surprised to know that you don't actually need to know that much about business. But you must be extremely clever and be able to find a solution for the client. We seek people who have shown an interest in a variety of different things and are not purely focused on becoming the CEO of a large company in a short time and see consulting as a way to achieve that.
Roland Berger in China is only one part of the picture of Roland Berger worldwide. Our approach to MBAs in China is not the same as that in our other offices in other countries. In China, we do not prefer overseas MBAs to MBAs from Chinese business schools. The people we have hired here in Shanghai mostly have a local MBA or equivalent qualification.The real success stories with us in China over the last couple of years have not come directly out of schools, they have come from industry. These are people who have been able to leverage their industry expertise with their consulting knowledge and most of them have an MBA. We have only one very successful member of staff who doesn't have an MBA, but made it to project manager in four years. He has excellent client relationship skills, particularly at managing senior Chinese managers and winning their trust, that's why he is so good.
We occasionally send our staff for an EMBA, an example is one of the partners in our Beijing office. We don't usually sponsor our staff for MBA programs in China; it is an issue of cost. We like to leave the door open for those who choose to leave for MBA to come back. For people who leave China after working only a couple of years to take an MBA in the US with the hope of returning and getting a big package, I can say that this is not going to happen any more. You may be able to build a small network overseas but how worth while is that now in China?
To maintain an overseas network is also difficult. At the moment we do not offer a premium to returning overseas MBAs, unless they have very strong industry experience. We call the mindset that we are seeking in consultants 'intra-preneurial' - that is, the mindset of driving the company forward. You can immediately see if someone has the drive to make something and build and develop it and show others. Not many people have this. Being a reliable worker is not enough; you also need to fit into the team in terms of personality.Personally I hope that the trend of MBAs becoming younger and younger is reversed. The success stories 15 years ago, of MBAs becoming wealthy CEOs, no longer happens. I think that executives with considerable working experience are better suited to taking an EMBA. The real success stories with us in China over the last couple of years have not come directly out of schools, they have come from industry.
