Demystifying Consulting for Lifescience Graduates: Skills, Fit, and First Steps

A Welcome Note for Advanced Degree Students Considering Consulting Careers

Assessing Your Fit for Consulting

When considering a career in consulting, advanced lifescience degree students often question whether it is the right path for them. Unlike traditional lab-based industry roles, or those focused primarily on desk work, consulting positions can appear less rigid, more unpredictable, and demanding in both difficulty and time commitment. While this perception does have merit and makes it challenging to evaluate personal suitability, there are effective ways to approach this decision.

Transferable Skills and Types of Consulting

If you are contemplating a move into consulting and lack prior experience, my recommendation is to view consulting through the lens of transferable skills and interests that can be developed, rather than as a job that must simply be executed well. Consulting comes in various forms, with the broadest distinction being between general (or “management”) and specialist consulting.

Management consultants are typically generalists who tackle organisational challenges across industries. Their process involves deconstructing large business problems into smaller components, outlining a path to a defined goal, developing or selecting suitable frameworks, and conducting research and analysis to reach conclusions supported by evidence. Management consultants may conduct interviews with client team members, external stakeholders, and subject matter experts. Their work is often open-ended, and clients appreciate their ability to address complex issues using empirical evidence and first principles. They gather insights across multiple functional domains, though they rarely advise functional experts within these fields. Their primary clients are senior managers and C-suite executives, and these are the typical roles they transition to if they move out of consulting.

Specialist consultants, on the other hand, provide expertise in specific domains. These areas align with various company functions, such as Clinical Development or Marketing, where consultants may help design clinical trials or develop brand strategies. Unlike generalists, specialists rely heavily on function-specific knowledge, staying current by utilising information sources, cultivating professional relationships, and engaging in industry events. They often transition to industry roles that match their functional expertise.

Core Consulting Skills and How to Demonstrate Them

Although there are subtle differences in the skill-sets that benefit generalists versus specialists, most consulting skills are broadly applicable. Here is a breakdown of key skills and ways to demonstrate them during the interview process as a first-time consulting applicant:

Structured Thinking

By definition, consultants do not own the problems they are solving or the workstreams they have been brought in to help with. They have to start from the point of understanding the client’s needs independently as clients often do not have the ability or the time to articulate their needs in the most comprehensive and nuanced way and to provide all the context that might be necessary. Consultant have to relatively quickly understand the present state / business situation and the end goal of there involvement. With that established, they visualise the route from the current situation to the end goal and lay down milestones in between. Milestones usually take the form of interim deliverables such as stakeholder interviews, market sizing analysis and can have one or more workstreams feeding into each milestone. The consultant also needs to map any dependencies – e.g. one cannot start estimating the peak revenue a product could generate before they complete both the market sizing and the analogue market share analysis. Thus, piece-by-piece, a project is structured so that consultants can “follow the breadcrumbs” from the starting point to the final objective. Breaking down a given problem into component pieces, recognising their interconnections and coming up with a project plan is a key aspect of working on one’s thesis in a Master’s or PhD program. One has to understand the current state of knowledge in the topic they will be researching, identify which area or direction they want to focus their research on, and then map all the activities, milestones, and the order in which they need to come for one to be able to submit their dissertation a few years hence. That’s the framework! Populate it with specifics from your thesis research journey and you have a great story that showcases your structured thinking ability.  

Secondary Research

This may be a skill that is taken for granted by candidates and employers alike, but the devil is in the detail. The number of sources of information available at our fingertips has grown exponentially in just the last decade. Knowing how to construct a PubMed search string is still essential but for one to be a good researcher in the pharma world one also needs to be familiar with the plethora of open source and subscription databases that cover everything from patents to clinical trials to M&A deal structures in the industry and everything in between. As a graduate student, one may not have the opportunity or the resources to explore all available databases but the critical skill one can develop is how to maximise the quality and quantity of insights that can be obtained from the available sources. This involves being able to pick the right starting point for research and following the trail of information in the direction of usable insights. Attention to detail is important here but so is seeing through “noise” and preventing yourself from going down unproductive rabbit holes. A researcher working on their graduate thesis does not work under the same time constraints as consultants do. Therefore, it is important that during the interview process and in the initial days of starting in a consulting role, one works on honing their secondary research style to find the right balance between depth of research and time to insights.

Primary Research

Primary research refers to collecting information directly from the source that “owns” it. While secondary research most often yields factual information (with or without analysis and commentary), primary research is more about gathering opinions from individuals that may or may not be linked directly to facts. For example, “how does a physician make treatment decision for their patients with macular degeneration?”, “what does a client stakeholder think about the complexity of the process they follow to check for contamination in manufactured product?”, or “what does a regulatory affairs expert think about the challenges a new drug for gastric cancer may face when submitted to the FDA for approval?”. Consultants use primary research as a powerful tool in producing insights that are tailored to the needs of a given client. Primary research can take the form of surveys, interviews, focus groups, online discussion boards, etc. and can be structured in formal or informal manner. It is governed by code of ethics that apply to different forms of primary research such as market research and competitive intelligence. In a consulting engagement, primary research is almost always accompanied by secondary research, with the latter being used to inform the targets, format, and design of the former. Unless your academic research involved interviewing a lot of people or conducting surveys, you may not have experience in fieldwork but most of the skill needed in primary research is in the planning stage rather than the execution. Writing a survey questionnaire or interview discussion guide requires one to think about what data they want to collect and work back to what questions they should ask. This is similar to a researcher planning their study and codifying it into a study protocol or data collection forms. Analysing the data collected from a survey is done using spreadsheet software or statistical analysis software packages, again something most academic researchers are quite adept at.

Project Management

Consulting teams usually operate with hierarchies with the project lead acting as a project manager. Entry-level candidates can expect to work their way to the PM position in 2-3 years on average but utilising appropriate project management skills at any level helps one be more effective and efficient at work while also helping improve their growth trajectory within the organisation. At its heart, project management involves juggling competing priorities, setting timelines and deadlines, and coordinating team members to ensure deliverables are met on schedule. Consultants must be able to anticipate risks, manage resources effectively, and adapt when unexpected challenges arise. At an individual contributor level this could mean prioritising the tasks assigned to you, negotiating deadlines for competing priorities, keeping managers abreast of your progress, and flagging foreseeable delays in advance. In academia, managing a thesis or research project provides a practical grounding in these skills. For example, planning the stages of data collection, managing collaborations with supervisors or peers, and keeping the project on track with interim deadlines mirrors the project management approach needed in consulting. During interviews, candidates can demonstrate project management ability by describing how they kept their academic projects organised, navigated setbacks, and delivered results within tight timelines. This shows the ability to handle multiple tasks and highlights resilience and adaptability in the face of a rapidly evolving environment – a critical skill needed in consulting.

Creative Writing and Storytelling

A consultant’s job is not over until the client feels that they have delivered. In this, research and analysis are only half the battle. While consultants are often mocked for the inordinate amount of time they spend creating and presenting slide decks, this is one of the primary ways in which they deliver value to the client. The stage that follows research and analysis is called “synthesis” and involves distilling the most important, most useful, and actionable learnings from a project and presenting them to the client in a clear, comprehensive, yet digestible manner. The best way to keep anyone engaged and make sure they absorb what you are saying is to tell a good story. A story has a clear beginning and an end, a middle that follows a logical and natural sequence, and a “moral” which is traditionally revealed at the very end. In consulting, we often start with the moral – or the main takeaways from the project. Then we present the key findings obtained through our analysis backed by evidence collected during our research. In this process, we may have to choose to not mention a lot of the intermediate steps and results that led us to our final conclusion and that is perfectly fine. However, I have observed that many individuals who excelled academically often struggle to deliver compelling presentations to business audiences, as they become overly absorbed in methodological details or get bogged down in specific findings. This skill is assessed during case interviews, where candidates who consistently keep sight of the main objective and effectively synthesise the key points into a clear, concise conclusion or recommendation are rated highly.

 

Final Thoughts: Unlocking your potential in Consulting

Ultimately, consulting is less about having followed a prescribed career path and more about recognising and applying a set of core skills in a fast‑paced, impact‑driven environment. If you have progressed through an advanced degree, chances are you already possess many of the capabilities that underpin success in consulting you may just not have labelled them as such yet. By reframing your academic experiences through the lens of structured thinking, research, project management, and storytelling, consulting becomes far less opaque and far more accessible. Armed with this understanding, the best way to assess your fit is simply to give it a try: explore case interviews, speak to consultants, apply for roles, and experience firsthand how these skills come together in practice. You may find that consulting is not just a viable option, but a rewarding next step in your professional journey.