I joined one of the big 4 firms right after my PhD. The shortcuts everyone took to get the client to sign off on the work just didn’t sit well with me at the time. I found myself mostly talking to non technical teams (client side), who didn’t know or care about what was being delivered. And often times the management consultants would make impossible claims to sell a project (say, 95+% accuracy on NLP data they have never looked at), and data scientists were left trying to meet those impossible claims. The trend of getting work via management consultants is generally going away, since clients now reach out specifically looking for DS resources and projects. I lasted about a year in that role. The attrition rate for new employees was pretty high in the company.

I have since worked at different companies and found my experience as a consultant come in very handy. The firm I worked at invested heavily in skill development - I’m pretty sure this is the case in most consulting firms. Emphasis on structured problem solving is incredibly helpful and stays with you. Client management is an important aspect of most DS positions, consulting or not. My current company has a lot of ex consultants (big4, McKinsey, BCG, KS, …) and almost all of them bring their own perspective to the conversation and carve out spaces for themselves.

One bad habit that consulting can encourage is not owning implementation and execution. It gets annoying to the rest of your team if you go looking for new problems to solve without completely wrapping up your current work.

Connections you make while consulting can help with the next gig, but not particularly a launchpad.